Liminal Writing in the Italian Diaspora by Eveljn Ferraro Laurea

Home , Cinema of Italy, Italian diaspora, Lamerica

Moving Thresholds:

Liminal Writing in the Italian Diaspora

By Eveljn Ferraro

Laurea, Università di Palermo, 1999

M.A., University of Essex, 2003

M.A., University of Pittsburgh, 2004

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Italian Studies at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island

May, 2010

This dissertation by Eveljn Ferraro is accepted in its present form

by the Department of Italian Studies as satisfying the

dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date______Massimo Riva, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date______Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Reader

Date______Teresa Fiore, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date______Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School

iii

CURRICULUM VITAE

Eveljn Ferraro was born on September 21, 1976 in Messina, Italy. In March 1999, she graduated summa cum laude from the University of Palermo with a Laurea in Foreign Languages and Literatures. She then went on to complete two Masters, one in Translation and Comparative Literature from the University of Essex (UK, 2003, with distinction) and another in Italian Language and Literature from the University of Pittsburgh, PA (2004). She came to Brown in September 2004 to begin doctoral work and received a broad training in Italian Studies, American immigrant literature, and teaching methodology. During the 2006-07 academic year, she was an Exchange Scholar in the Department of French and Italian at Stanford University and then spent the 2008-10 academic years as a Visiting Student Researcher in the Department of Italian Studies at UC Berkeley. She has taught Italian language and culture courses at the University of Pittsburgh, Brown University, in Bologna, Italy, and in Albany, CA.

Her dissertation is the result of original research and writing, but it also partially incorporates two recent publications. Specifically, Chapter 1 is, in part, a reprint of the material as it appears in “Between Italy and America: Exile and Suspension in Ebe Cagli Seidenberg‟s Il Tempo dei Dioscuri,” an essay included in the collection Carte Italiane: A Journal of Italian Studies (2009), edited by Sarah A. Carey and Brendan W. Hennessey (Series 2, Vol. 5. 181-98). And Chapter 3 is, in part, a reprint of the material as it has been submitted for publication in “Southern Encounters in the City: Reconfiguring the South from the Liminal Space” to Small Towns, Big Cities: The Urban Experience of Italian Americans, edited by Dennis Barone and Stefano Luconi. New York: Bordighera. 13 pp. ms. (forthcoming, 2010). Some other publications include: “Italianization of Emigration to Canada: Or, What is the Role of the Italies outside of Italy?” The Cultures of Italian Migration: Diverse Trajectories and Discrete Perspectives. Ed. Graziella Parati and Anthony J. Tamburri. Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson UP. 19 pp. ms. (forthcoming, 2010); Review of Avanti Popolo: Italian-American Writers Sail Beyond Columbus. Ed. The Italian- American Political Solidarity Club. San Francisco: Manic D Press 2008. Altreitalie. 4 pp. ms. (forthcoming, 2010); “La dialettica degli spazi in Ogni passione spenta di Vita Sackville-West.” Leggere Donna Gen.-Feb. 2000: 25-6.

Her research interests include: migrant literature and cinema in connection with migrations to/from Italy and Italian national identity; Italian literature (19th – 21st century); Italian American and Italian Canadian cultures; theories of space and liminality, in relation to migration, nationalism, post-colonialism, and writing.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is a pleasure to acknowledge some of the faculty, friends, and family members who have made possible the completion of this dissertation. It has taken several years and a long research journey through three university campuses: Brown University, my home institution, Stanford University, my husband‟s past institution, and the University of California at Berkeley, where we find ourselves living nearby. I am heartily thankful to Massimo Riva, who has been a supportive doctoral advisor to me throughout my graduate school years at Brown. His encouragement and supervision from the preliminary stages of this project have helped me develop an interdisciplinary understanding of the subject and its connections to the multifaceted field of Italian Studies. Massimo has taught me a lot about stimulating creativity in my work and approaching my research and writing with intellectual rigor. He has always given me great freedom to pursue independent work while his presence, guidance, and feedback have been crucial during critical moments of the dissertation process. I would also like to acknowledge the other members of the doctoral committee. In organizing the Italian Studies colloquium, in spring of 2006, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg first provided me with the opportunity to present my topic to graduate students, faculty, and scholars of the Brown community. Suzanne has followed the progress of my project from the beginning, and has always been open to discuss my ideas and doubts, and suggest new readings and analytical tools. She also took the time to meet with me every time I travelled back “home” to the department on Hope Street from California. Teresa Fiore joined the committee probably during one of the most intense periods of her academic career. Her approach to space, migration and identity issues and her extremely generous and sharp comments have greatly contributed to the tone and discipline of my writing and the direction of my dissertation work as a whole. During the last three years, Teresa has shared relevant materials and many stimulating and entertaining conversations across multiple borders (virtual and real). Un grazie speciale. I also gratefully acknowledge the institutional support that I have received while working on this project. In particular, I thank Brown University for providing me with fellowships and teaching assistantships and allowing me to conduct research in California, where I retrieved the original materials analyzed in Chapter 1. My investigation on the life and works of Ebe Cagli Seidenberg has involved many people, including Cynthia De Nardi, Carla Zingarelli-Rosenlicht, James Stimpert, Elisa Ferraro and Tindaro Starvaggi. Writing about migration while often moving from home to home has at times been a challenge. But I have been fortunate to find teachers, colleagues and friends who have made this journey memorable and supported this project in different ways. I wish to thank Richard Meckel for his course on ethnic literature in the U.S. and his sense of humor; Mona Delgado for her emotional and administrative assistance, Dedda De Angelis for being a wonderful and balanced teacher, Caroline Castiglione, Ron Martinez, and David Kertzer for their different types of support; and my fellow graduate students for the wonderful memories of the time spent together preparing for class, chatting over countless coffees and bagels, or gasping while chasing a soccer ball. Many thanks also to my friends from Italy and the U.S. who have patiently listened to and encouraged me during these years. And I would like to acknowledge Laura E. Ruberto for refining my v

translations and introducing me to many interesting people/places in the San Francisco bay area. I owe my deepest gratitude to my father, Michele, who has always had confidence in my intellectual pursuits and will not hesitate to call me “dottoressa al quadrato”; to my mother, Valeria, who has in these years matched that confidence with hundreds of phone calls from Sicily and much appreciated moral support; to my brother and sisters, Giuseppe, Milena, and Elisa, who showed me that life „at home‟ is just as hectic as it was when we were children and who never fail to ask: “Quando tornate?”; and to my grandmother, Carmela, who has strongly advocated for a formal education that was never accessible to her. The births of my niece Francesca and my nephew Riccardo remind me of how long this project has taken to finish and of the sacrifices that distance imposes. My greatest debt goes to Massimo, a generous, indulgent, and caring companion with whom this doctoral journey has become a life-long project together. He has been my first reader and editor, and an excellent driver throughout the many places we have crossed and lived together in North America (and beyond) while I was “walking/writing” through the pages of this dissertation. Among all these places, Vincenzo and Giuliana‟s home in Florida has been a welcoming home away from home.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page Copyright Page Signature Page iii Curriculum Vitae iv Acknowledgments v Table of Contents vii

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER 1 Moving in Suspension: Ebe Cagli Seidenberg‟s Journeys between Italy and America 28

1.1 Common Departures, Separate Returns in Il Tempo dei Dioscuri 33

1.2 Lo Sgombero and the Migratory Aesthetics of Il Tempo dei Dioscuri 48

1.3 Family, Nation, and Geographies of Suspension in Il Tempo dei Dioscuri and Le sabbie del silenzio 60

1.4 From Il Tempo and Le sabbie to Come ospiti: Eva ed altri. Framing Transnational Connections through Writing 69

CHAPTER 2 Stubborn Relics: Re-tracing the Soil of Identity in Frank G. Paci‟s Black Madonna and Italian Shoes 95

2.1 “To them the Sault … was l’America”: Italian Relics in Canada 97

2.2 Bending to the Ground: Return and Art of Writing in Italian Shoes 115

2.3 Can the Decontextualized Subaltern Speak? Voice and Ordinary Language 129

CHAPTER 3 Embodying Liminality: Southern Diasporas and Racial Boundaries in Kym Ragusa‟s The Skin Between Us 145

3.1 Southern Encounters in the City: Negotiating Distance 148

3.2 A Sicilian Frame with a “Meridian” Vision 167

CONCLUSIONS Concluding with Lamerica 183

LIST OF WORKS CITED 207 vii

INTRODUCTION

Lying in the middle of the Mediterranean basin and at the southern extremity of Europe,

Italy has a long history of invasions and internal fragmentation that has resulted in a fragile sense of national identity. Since its Unification, phenomena of strong regionalism and the persistent divide between North and South have created the basis for a long- standing internal debate on the identity of the Italian nation. At the same time, the extraordinary extent of its emigrations has contributed to the peculiar history of Italy among its neighboring countries. Migratory movements are particularly relevant to this dissertation, which investigates Italian national identity through the cultures produced by those migrations to North America, one of the main destinations of the Italian diaspora.

Assuming that between home and away lie real and imagined distances that migrant subjects (meaning a vast category of people moving forcibly or voluntarily) continuously cover and uncover, this project proposes to address the following set of questions: how does movement affect one‟s relation to new spaces and old contexts? And how does it help reproduce or reinvent notions of local and national identity outside the national borders? How do ruptures and crises, determined by movement, manifest themselves in a text? Within the framework of Italian Studies, what kind of connections can bring closer together texts that in the past would have appeared foreign to each other? And why is it so relevant to encourage this critical practice in this historical time of global migrations?

The objective of this work is to explore the transformative power of liminal or

“in-between” spaces, as represented within and by the writing of the Italian diaspora. In particular, it argues that the concept of liminality, as embodied by the migrants‟ positioning and the spaces that they inhabit, has the capacity to challenge essentialist notions of Italian national identity by letting emerge its many-sided character, and to encourage a dynamic approach to borders. In order to address the above questions and obtain my goal, I will adopt a model of analysis that I call “moving thresholds” and define as a spatial metaphor of crossing rooted in human mobility and relying on theoretical elaborations of liminality and space. As I will clarify below, in this context,

“moving” will be used to refer to three interconnected aspects, namely: 1) material movements, which are usually summed up by statistical data and arrows contained in graphs and tables; 2) the emotions (hopes, losses, fears, etc.) and the mental reconfigurations (of the past, place of origin, distance, identity, etc.) associated with physical displacement, which are often disregarded in institutional discourses on migration; and 3) the potential changes that a combined, real and imagined, view of movement can determine in our understanding of thresholds as spaces of separation and bridging.

Statistical data collected by historians and social scientists tell us about the unique dimensions of Italian outbound migrations: 26 million Italians during the 1876 -1976 period left and scattered around the world, and while over 50% of them returned (Cerase

116 Tab. 1), their wide presence abroad has generated by the mid-1990s a population of almost 60 million people of Italian descent living outside Italy (Golini 59), roughly equal to the current population living within the country.1 Much is yet to be done to shed light

3 on and disseminate this history of local and global connections, which today overlaps with the parallel unfolding history of immigration to Italy. As Enrico Pugliese observes in

L’Italia tra migrazioni internazionali e migrazioni interne, it is peculiar that the first national conference on emigration was held in Rome only in 1975, that is, when the end of massive Italian migrations was being sanctioned by a drastic reduction of both international and internal migrations (these resumed in the mid-1990s), and immigration was soon to emerge as an unexpected phenomenon first recorded in the 1981 general census (65-72). Today, immigration adds a new protagonist and a new voice in the debate on Italian national identity, a voice that at the moment counts on over 4.5 million people (7.2 % of the total population), which is the number of documented foreign citizens currently living in Italy.2

Emigration and immigration are not comparable in quantitative or chronological terms, but the emergence of the latter seems to have contributed to the critical attention drawn to the former and develop new interpretative tools and interdisciplinary frameworks within which to retrospectively discuss its multifarious aspects. In the volume Itinera, editor Maddalena Tirabassi identifies immigration as one of the multiple factors3 that have allowed emigration to “rightfully” (“a pieno titolo” 7) enter the Italian public debate, rather than remain the object of study for a handful of historiographers.

Such an important advancement, for Tirabassi, needs to be supported by a scientifically rigorous treatment of migration issues that avoids self-centered notions of identity and encourages, instead, the connection between different phases of (and scholarly works on)

Italian migrations (e.g., the “great” emigration of the turn of the XX century and post-

World War II movements) on the basis of a common engagement with transnational

4 research on today‟s global migrations, and the analytical categories that it has produced.

Only through a transnational and interdisciplinary approach, in my opinion, is it possible to answer the questions posed above while also shaping new trajectories of research that bridge the distance between emigration and immigration.

Along this route, I will embrace a number of concepts from a variety of disciplinary fields to develop my notion of moving thresholds. From the historiographic debate, I borrow the category of diaspora elaborated by Donna Gabaccia in Italy’s Many

Diasporas, where she states that “[t]he modern diasporas of Italy were webs of social connections and channels of communication between the wider world and a particular paese (village) or patria (hometown). They rested on migrants‟ close identification with the face-to-face communities of family, neighborhood, and native town” (3). In this concept of diaspora, a multiplicity of communities and loyalties substitutes for one univocal concept of national community. The word “diaspora” in the subtitle of my work implies Gabaccia‟s plurality of diasporas. I will, in fact, highlight these types of global networks between local villages and regions and migrant destinations abroad in chapters

2 and 3, while chapter 1 will deal with “victim diasporas,” a term referred by Robin

Cohen to those minorities, like the Jews, who fled to avoid persecution, and whose experience remains marginal within Italy‟s migratory past (Gabaccia 6). Moreover, as I will demonstrate through the notion of liminality, the category of diaspora will be considered here beyond the “myth of return” that its traditional use suggests. Gabaccia‟s concept of diaspora is relevant to this project not only because it encourages the understanding of the historical and social specificities of Italy‟s migrations across different spaces, but also because it is intrinsically transnational and focuses on the

5 construction of human identity across state borders. As she notes, what anthropologists call transnationalism, that is, “a way of life that connects family, work, consciousness in more than one national territory” (11), has old roots, since the concept is strictly related to migratory movement. My exploration of transnational lives and socio-cultural ties will concern centers and margins, and the vertical power relations characterizing, for instance, the position of Italian migrants and minority cultures vis-à-vis the dominant discourse of the country of arrival. However, I will likewise examine the relationships among different margins and the horizontal rapports among powerless or marginalized groups, or what has been called “minor transnationalism” (Lionnet and Shih).4

Moreover, a notion of diaspora centering on “migrations‟ impact on human culture and identity, and on the evolution of the human collectivities … that make life both human and culturally diverse” (Gabaccia 10) combines the physicality of movement with its emotional and mental aspects. A view of migration that integrates these elements is a fundamental assumption of this project. Being uprooted from familiar geographies and introduced into foreign places leads the human subject to rethink her/is emotional as well as epistemological relationship with the world, eliciting a revision of old and new surroundings, of here and there. Real journeys entail other, imagined, travels/crossings.

All these processes do not occur in an emotional vacuum; rather, they generate in the migrants tensions and desires, fears and expectations that transform the physical experience of movement into a symbolic and emotional journey fraught with challenges.

Metaphors of travel and dislocation abound in postmodern critical thinking. Their spatialization has produced various reconfigurations of borders, sites, maps, and diasporas, bringing at the same time new attention to individuals and groups that inhabit

6 marginal spaces and to social and cultural practices of alliance and resistance. However, as it has been argued, many contemporary discourses of displacement omit to historicize, for example, notions of “home” and “away” (Kaplan, Questions). As a result, within many of these critical constructs, as well as in merely quantitative studies of migration, the human dimension associated with the act of moving is rarely given the attention that it needs, being obscured by the efforts of reducing it either to graphic evidence or to conceptualizations of space and movement. How are these conceptualizations and the perceptions which inform them related to the emotional experience of traveling across space (and time), across visible or invisible borders, away from, or at home?

As I stated above, the “moving thresholds” is itself a theoretical model, but it is built on the consciousness that migrations are material processes deeply characterized by a subjective dimension. Indeed, they involve individual men and women who ought to be seen as “protagonists” of their migratory experiences rather than tagged as “typical representatives” of any culture or group, as Sandro Mezzadra argues in Diritto di fuga

(19). For this reason, throughout my textual analyses, I will attempt to highlight the migrants‟ perceptions of space and how these influence their construction of identity, while showing the changes that intervene in the transition from migrant to post-migrant generations. Convinced that a comprehensive approach to Italian emigration that encompasses this subjective aspect of “moving” would allow a better understanding of the immigrants‟ conditions in Italy, I embrace Pugliese‟s belief that despite the mutant times and trajectories of migrations, the different protagonists, causes, and patterns, it is possible to trace some common elements of the migratory experience. First and foremost, the “character itself of the emigration experience, which is at once painful and difficult,

7 but also an experience of emancipation” (13). The tension stemming from a confrontation between two or more socio-cultural and geopolitical spaces plays out at multiple levels and across generations, reflecting the “double space” and “suspension of identity” of the migrants (Mezzadra, Diritto 63, 65). In the context of the Italian diaspora in North

America, I will contend that such a conflict has been instrumental to the shaping of liminal subjects and cultural texts that configure Italian national identity itself as liminal, according to a concept of liminality that I am going to clarify.

The title of this project emphasizes the direct correlation between “thresholds” and “liminal,” given that “limen” means “threshold” in Latin. Describing narrow in- between zones that are marginal to the areas across which they lie (e.g., the inside/outside of a house or a church), thresholds evoke both a sense of constraint and possibility, stasis and movement, belonging and un-belonging. In my view, this is the ambiguous space that

Italian migrants and cultural productions by/about them occupy, the former in their double status of e/im-migrants, the latter for their problematic belonging to different cultural topographies. Liminality, or the condition of inhabiting the threshold, does not solve the tensions between the opposing areas situated on the two sides of a threshold, but rather is a way out of the impasse of the either/or. With the purpose of contesting a number of socially constructed dichotomies, this work will focus on multiple manifestations of liminality, such as: geographical, ethnic, racial, generational, and cultural liminality. I envision the threshold as a space where continuing crossings occur, in terms of conflicts, processes of negotiation, and creative interventions.5 Hence, the definition of “moving thresholds,” which disassociates these spaces from the idea of stasis, or of an unproductive suspension, by firmly connecting them to the activity of

8 writing. “Liminal writing” thus refers to the literary representations of multiple types of liminality as well as to the space of writing itself – be it arranged in the form of an autobiographical or fictional novel, a memoir or other genres – conceived as a site of significant crossings.

My interest in interstitial zones and the relational process of identity arises from the work of cultural and postcolonial studies critics, and the argument that Homi Bhabha puts forward at the beginning of The Location of Culture: “What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences” (1). While I share Bhabha‟s belief that in cultural interstices we can locate “the space of intervention … that introduces creative invention into existence” (9), my notion of thresholds as in-between spaces of ambiguity, creativity, and potential transformations evolves, primarily, from anthropologist Victor Turner‟s concept of liminality, and from the spatial perspectives provided by philosopher Michel de Certeau, sociologist Franco Cassano, and geographer Edward Soja.

In the essay “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” included in The Forest of Symbols (1967, 93-111), Turner discusses liminality,6 the central of the three stages that, according to Van Gennep, characterize rites of passage like initiations. For Van Gennep, separation, margin or limen, and aggregation, mark the passage of an individual or group from a certain position in the social structure to another. In the first stage, the initiands are symbolically, and often physically, separated from their ordinary social life and become transitional beings or “liminal personae”

(Turner, Forest 95), because they occupy an “in-between” space which does not

9 correspond to a “state,” that is a fixed point or condition that is culturally recognized (93-

4). During the liminal period, the condition of the subjects of passage is ambiguous especially due to their structural “invisibility.” Indeed, they are “at once no longer classified and not yet classified” (96), their position is “betwixt and between,” and thus they can claim nothing. Metaphorically, liminal subjects go underground or into eclipse, and the process of dying to be reborn as a new self is accompanied by the creative recombination of the elements of culture. Looking at societies as structures of positions,

Turner thus regards liminality as an interstructural or anti-structural (“at once destructured and prestructured,” 98) situation that lays emphasis on transition and transformation. In the last stage of the rite of passage, the neophytes or initiands are reincorporated into society, but in their newly achieved position or “state” (e.g., the child re-enters as an adult or a person as a member of a religious group or an exclusive club).

My vision of the migrant as a subject “betwixt and between” is in part influenced by the notion of liminality developed by Turner. However, what interests me the most about his formulations is the creative potential that he sees in liminality, in spite of the fact that it cannot escape the grip of social and cultural structures. In a later essay,

“Liminal to liminoid, in play, flow, and ritual,” Turner states:

[T]o my mind it is the analysis of culture into factors and their free or “ludic” recombination in any and every possible pattern, however weird, that is of the essence of liminality, liminality par excellence…. what is potentially and in principle a free and experimental region of culture, a region where not only new elements but also new combinatory rules may be introduced. (60-1)

Notably, for Turner, the capacity to experiment or “play” with familiar elements and, by defamiliarizing them, to let emerge novel configurations, is less typical of tribal and agrarian societies than of large-scale complex social systems shaped by industrial revolutions. In such contexts, where liminality is mainly used in a metaphorical sense, the emphasis is shifted from the anonymity, obligation, and normativeness of the liminal phases of tribal rituals to the principles of individuality, “optionality” (i.e., the possibility of disordering the given cultural elements and rules at will), and subversion characteristic of the manifold “liminoid” genres of post-industrial societies, such as the leisure genres of art, literature, and entertainment (74-5). In light of this distinction between “liminal” and “liminoid” phenomena, my use of “liminal” may actually be closer to Turner‟s conceptualization of the “liminoid” for the degree of experimentation that he grants to this type of anti-structure as “an independent domain of creative activity” that can generate “alternative models for living, from utopias to programs, which are capable of influencing the behavior of those in mainstream social and political roles … in the direction of radical change” (65). This suggests that literature, and art in general, for

Turner, is not separated from the social and political arenas, and can, in fact, bring changes into them. Therefore, Turner‟s notion of liminality is relevant for my exploration of writing in the Italian diaspora with respect not only to the textual representation of liminal subjects, spaces, and transformations, but also to the space of writing itself as a liminal site from which novel configurations and ideas may arise, and possibly produce new critical modes of thinking, operating, and perhaps even of being.

The connection with social life and the pertinence of liminality to my project are further illustrated by Turner‟s view on “communitas,” a modality of human

11 interrelatedness that emerges in liminality, when the structurally invisible initiands, preserving their individual distinctiveness, can develop forms of comradeship that underscore unity and equality. If in pre-industrial social formations, the “confrontations of human identities” is direct and unmediated, in industrial societies, “it is within leisure, sometimes aided by the projections of art, that this way of experiencing one‟s fellows can be portrayed, grasped, and sometimes realized” (77). In either case, communitas does not erase structural norms and is temporary, since “the initially free and innovative relationships between individuals are converted into norm-governed relationships between social personae,” with “the paradox that the experience of communitas becomes the memory of communitas” (78).

The memory of the peculiar social relationships emerging in liminality among marginalized individuals will be a major theme in this dissertation. In place of the initiands, it will deal with a vast category of migrants and post-migrants, threshold subjects occupying structurally marginal positions, and whom Turner would possibly classify as “marginals.” Indeed, in the essay “Passages, Margins and Poverty: Religious

Symbols of Communitas” (in Dramas, 1974, 231 ff.), the anthropologist defines

“marginals” those who are at once members of two or more distinct social and cultural groups (by ascription, choice, self-definition or achievement), including, among others, migrant foreigners, people of mixed ethnic origin, second-generation Americans, women in less traditional roles, and a disproportionately high number of writers, artists, and philosophers (233). Turner argues that “marginals” aspire to the higher status group as their structural reference group while often looking for communitas into the group of origin (i.e., the lower status group); and that sometimes these oft-highly conscious people

12 embrace communitas to develop radical critiques of the social structure while other times they tend to deny this “affectually warmer and more egalitarian bond” (233). Like ritual liminal personae, marginals are also “betwixt and between,” but unlike them, “they have no cultural assurance of a final stable resolution of their ambiguity” (233). This opens up, in my view, the possibility that liminality may not necessarily configure itself as a temporary phase followed by reintegration but, rather, define a permanent position. For this reason, I will especially concentrate on the spatiality of liminality, or on liminality as an “experimental region of culture” (Turner, “Liminal,” 61), and on the creative and critical qualities that liminal crossings potentially embed. This spatial rather than chronological approach will be illustrated in the first chapter through the novels of the

Italian Jewish writer Ebe Cagli Seidenberg. Her texts also embody a transnational concept of communitas, since they focus on liminal subjects brought together from different countries to escape persecution.

While the concept of liminality is the leading thread that binds together the chapters of this dissertation, its exploration will be carried out in connection with theories of space elaborated in other fields and, to different degrees, resonating with the ideas exposed above. Focusing on the relationships between spatial practices and the constructed order, Michel de Certeau‟s investigation of “place” and “space” in The

Practice of Everyday Life provides valuable tools for this project. In the chapter titled

“Spatial Stories,” the French philosopher makes the following distinction between space

(espace) and place (lieu):

A place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location (place). The law of the “proper” rules in the place: the elements [are] each situated in its own “proper” and distinct location, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability. A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables…. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it…. [i]n relation to place, space is like the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualization, … and modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts…. it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a “proper.” In short, space is a practiced place. (117)

In applying this opposition to spatial narratives, de Certeau associates “places” with inert or dead objects, and “spaces” with operations, adding that stories continuously transform places into spaces and vice versa (118). In chapter 2, I will rely on the interplay of these elements to examine the role of spatial practices in the migrants‟ reproduction of regional

Italian identity in Canada, and with respect to the author‟s construction of the writing space. In such analysis, a particular relevance will be given to “relics” as spatial traces that surviving the passage of time, and appearing (or re-appearing) at a certain location or across different points (as a result of human migrations), create a spatial dynamic between stasis and movement, or what de Certeau‟s terms “place” and “space.” I will use this concept of relic with respect to migratory writing, and specifically to Paci‟s novels, in order to underscore the ambivalence that such traces produce simultaneously within the writing space and in relation to the reinvention of Italian identity across generations.

Although the semantic tension that the word “relic” contains is partially articulated in de

Certeau‟s The Practice of Everyday Life, its theoretical potential remains scattered throughout the volume. Some of the author‟s ideas about relics are particularly relevant to

14 my analysis. For instance, he asserts that data points on maps provide only “a relic set” that makes invisible an operation by replacing it with the trace left behind (97). “Relic set” here refers to “fixations” that ultimately “constitute procedures for forgetting,” a point that deserves critical reflection in a discourse on cultural texts and national identity outside of Italy. In the same chapter, “Walking in the City,” the “verbal relics” that compose stories are described as “being tied to lost stories and opaque acts,” and as

“leftovers,” “fragments of scattered semantic places,” “details and excesses coming from elsewhere” that inserted in the constructed order of the text produce “anti-texts” and

“possibilities of moving” (107). The ambivalence of the relic as a sign of stability/death

(as in the first example) or movement (as in the second) is moreover traceable in the practice of writing. For de Certeau, indeed, writing begins from a loss of speech (what cannot be said), which the act of writing repeats “in each of its graphs, the relics of a walk through language” (195). In this somewhat cryptic expression, relics might represent the fragments of writing, absent or dead pieces except outside themselves, in the presence of the reader toward whom writing moves.

On a more general epistemological level, de Certeau‟s concern with the geography and practice of everyday life, with ordinary people and their “tactics” (“an art of the weak” opposed to the “strategies” or manipulations of the powerful, 37), privileges a “view from below” approach. Contemplating New York City from atop the World

Trade Centers, he argues that the view from above, a voyeuristic gaze, homogenizes the complexity of the city, making it - “the most immoderate of human texts” - readable, thus fixing its “opaque mobility in a transparent text” (92). The everyday, however, escapes such a totalizing image, since the “ordinary practitioners of the city live „down below,‟

15 below the thresholds at which visibility begins…. [They] make use of spaces that cannot be seen…. elude visibility” (93). Within my project, de Certeau‟s view from below will help clarify the positioning of a post-migrant author like Frank Paci with respect to his ethnic background and the spaces he and his writing inhabit. But that view is also tied to the wider question about the possibility for silenced liminal subjects to speak and be listened to, which I will address at the end of the second chapter through Spivak and

Verdicchio; and, ultimately, to the question of the co-implication of subject and object of study that regards this research project itself, and that I will discuss in the conclusions.

If for de Certeau it is important to explore the micropolitics of everyday life from close-up, sociologist Franco Cassano, in Il pensiero meridiano urges “to look at the map again, broaden one‟s vision beyond the national borders, make out new connections, new proximities and distances” (X, my translation). He thus encourages a transnational perspective that links the South of Italy to the global Souths, and, in particular, to the other people of the Mediterranean basin, which he envisions as a border, a place of negotiation of multiple voices, and where “the world of the North-West meets the South-

East” (XXIV) or, in my words, as a threshold, a liminal crossing space. Cassano‟s

“meridian thinking” is centered on the concept of “balance” (“misura”) between the two opposite fundamentalisms of the earth and of the sea, respectively embodying “the ground of identity, common belonging and social ties,” and “the idea of departure … the adventure of individual freedom” (XXX). His vision of the connecting Souths hinges upon the ability to fight against fundamentalisms and transform the limits implied in borders into opportunities of negotiation. Cassano states that the key element for a reconfiguration of the South consists in “riguardare i luoghi” (X) in its double meaning of

16 looking at places again (tornare a guardare) and taking care of them (avere riguardo), by locating them in a transnational frame and, at once, claiming them as vehicles of belonging, identity and solidarity.

This twofold concept of place will be adopted in the third chapter to investigate

Southern connections in the double diaspora – Italian and African – to New York City in

Kym Ragusa‟s memoir. In so doing, I will deliberately insert Cassano‟s discourse in a geographical context that goes beyond his vision of Souths. While my notion of liminal space espouses Cassano‟s anti-essentialist and transformative ideas of borders, I also believe that it needs to be expanded. Hence my attempt to make “meridian thinking” more inclusive and transnational by bridging some of its operational concepts to voices of the Mediterranean rising from elsewhere, most notably from the Norths where migratory processes have scattered them.

Another spatial theory that I will embrace in this work is what geographer Edward

Soja calls “Thirdspace.” As he points out in Thirdspace, it is “an-Other way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life, a distinct mode of critical spatial awareness” (10) that draws upon and extends beyond the traditional dual mode of thinking about space as either real or imagined. While Firstspace epistemologies focus on the materiality of spatial forms, on what can be empirically measured and mapped,

Secondspace perspectives concentrate on ideas about space and on mental or cognitive representations of human spatiality. Thirdspace is thus the product of a “thirding-as-

Othering,” that is, it encompasses physical and mental spaces without being reducible to either First- or Secondspace. This “trialectics of spatiality” is modeled after Henri

Lefebvre‟s theorization of space and social spatiality7 in The Production of Space, and

17 reflects his interlinked triad of: Spatial Practice or “perceived space,” (roughly, Soja‟s

Firstspace); Representations of Space or “conceived space,” i.e., “conceptualized space, the space of scientists, planners, urbanists, …” and, in Soja‟s Secondspace, also of the semiotician and the “purely creative imagination of some artists and poets” (Soja 66, 67); and, Spaces of Representation or “lived space,” which is distinct from and includes the other two spaces, embodies “complex symbolisms,” and is primarily “inhabited and used by artists, writers, and philosophers” (67). Soja observes that the second term of the triad, conceived space, is for Lefebvre “the dominant space in any society (or mode of production)” (67), since it tends to represent the controlling power and ideology through the written and spoken word. However, in this theorization, the “dominated” space is not located in the material Spatial Practices, but rather in the lived Space of Representation,

“passively experienced (subi) … space which the imagination (verbal but especially non- verbal) seeks to change and appropriate” (67-8). As Soja writes:

here we can find not just the spatial representations of power but the imposing and operational power of spatial representations. Combining the real and the imagined, things and thought … these lived spaces of representation are thus the terrain for the generation of „counterspaces,‟ spaces of resistance to the dominant order arising precisely from their subordinate, peripheral or marginalized positioning. With its foregrounding of relations of dominance, subordination, and resistance; its subliminal mystery and limited knowability; its radical openness and teeming imagery, this third space of Lefebvre closely approximates what I am defining as Thirdspace. (68)

Such a statement points to the political impetus that underlies Soja‟s Thirdspace (and

Lefebvre‟s lived space), which thus becomes a “strategic location” (68) from which space is not only understood and represented but potentially transformed. Fraught with

“perils as well as possibilities” (68), the spaces of representation are radically open, dynamic, vitally filled with symbols and politics. They are, in brief, the “dominated spaces” of marginalized subjects at all scales, the chosen spaces for social struggle and emancipation.

This concept of Thirdspace as a “dominated” space of representation will be used in the concluding chapter of this project to emphasize the loss of historical and cultural memory among Italians portrayed in the film Lamerica by Gianni Amelio, itself conceived as a space of representation, like the literary works previously analyzed. The influence of Soja‟s postmodern geography of Thirdspace on my work, nevertheless, reaches far beyond. It is largely responsible for shaping a multidirectional approach to migration within which the spatial mode of knowledge grants coherence and allows for a productive exchange among disciplines and perspectives (including the feminist standpoint of Haraway, and the subaltern viewpoints of Spivak and Verdicchio, among others). It has also constantly pushed my research, and my intellectual curiosity, a step further, in line with the view that “knowledge is not obtained in permanent constructions confidently built around formalized and closed epistemologies, but through an endless series of theoretical and practical approximations, a critical and inquisitive nomadism in which the journeying to new ground never ceases” (Soja 82).

At the methodological level, the concept of Thirdspace has influenced my way of navigating throughout the texts, by encouraging a combined “real-and-imagined” look at spaces, margins, and movements across limina. In turn, this thirdspatial view of the works under analysis has elicited and sustained a meta-textual reflection on the potential changes that my use of the writing space can bring to the debate on Italian national

19 identity, Italian Studies, and migration issues. Through its interdisciplinary and transnational representation of liminalities, in fact, this dissertation positions itself in a liminal space, like Thirdspace, full of “perils as well as possibilities” (Soja 68). By deconstructing binarisms, the “moving threshold” attempts to “thread through the complexities of the modern world,” (Lefebvre qtd. in Soja 57), to make sense of issues of race, gender, ethnicity, which are equally relevant for the „Italies outside of Italy‟ and for the current discourse on national identity within Italy‟s territorial borders.

In a project centered on a spatial perspective, the peril is to omit to contextualize the object of study. I certainly do not intend to abstract the texts of the Italian diaspora from the different historical migrations that have produced them or make a merely aesthetic use of spatial terms such as suspension, distance, and proximity. I believe, however, that migration must be understood and valued beyond the limits of its chronology. The category of space has allowed me to move through texts published in different geographical contexts (e.g., the U.S., Canada, and Italy) at various times

(ranging from 1975 to 2006), and to reveal the hidden questions that connect the Italian diaspora to immigration. Furthermore, in a project that emphasizes the link between migration and artistic production, this relation will be conceived as bidirectional, since aesthetics not only represents but is also affected by migration. In fact, “aesthetics is, by its very nature, migratory” (Durrant and Lord 12). In this regard, the model toward which this dissertation moves is that of a transnational migratory aesthetics that encompasses local, national, and global manifestations of Italian identity.

Immigration to Italy has generated, since the early 1990s, a growing number of cultural texts and critical contributions, although only a handful of scholarly works have

20 bridged immigration and emigration in discussing national identity.8 The Italian diaspora has, on the other hand, added to the complexity of other national cultures, while also leading to the formation of liminal literatures, such as the Italian American, and later on, the Italian Canadian. In the U.S., the debate on the “hyphenated” identity of Italian

Americans has produced important critical works (Tamburri, Gardaphè, Viscusi) that, although centered on the cultural relationships between the Italian ethnic group and the

U.S. mainstream, contextually problematize the tie between Italian America and Italy.

And in Canada, the question has been raised of the relation of postmodern Italy to its emigrants and the cultural implications of the “Italianization” of emigration (Loriggio

2004). Within this dissertation, such a question could be recast as follows: what kind of role can the “Italies” outside of Italy play within a transnational migratory aesthetics?

Through immigration, Italian national identity is being reshaped by forms of internal liminality – racial, ethnic, cultural, generational, and linguistic – that have already characterized, and continue to accompany, the experience of Italian emigration to North

America and throughout the world. In light of this, the model of the moving thresholds here employed in the context of the diaspora sets itself as a means of cultural and textual analysis that potentially connects emigration and immigration through issues of liminality. Its goal is to demonstrate that, ultimately, the very concept of italianità,

Italianness, is liminal and in movement. And this emerges more clearly in a transnational consideration of liminality and crossings, as reflected in the selection of texts comprised in this project.

The five autobiographical and fictional novels, the memoir, and the film briefly referred above will be read in my study as interconnected elements of a transnational

21 network within which they all participate in a boundary-breaking operation of migration and identity from peculiar positions. While they all offer representations of liminality (of the types described above), each of them relates liminality to different experiences and trajectories of migration, and to the specific personal backgrounds of migrants. Moreover, some of these texts are constructed as liminal spaces and genres that, in order to articulate narratives of memory, loss, and emancipation, incorporate and make interact various and diverse languages and materials, such as: drawings and epistolary writing, literary language and archival materials, English, standard and regional Italian, and so forth.

Addressing questions of race, gender, and ethnicity through representations of real and imagined movements, departures and returns, displacements and homecomings, all of these works will be considered in their capacity to challenge essentialist notions of Italian identity.

One methodological aspect of the transnational approach here adopted concerns the language of these texts. Sometimes, the argument is put forward that the investigation of Italian identity through the cultures of migration should be conducted by taking into account only works produced in Italian. Although my project clearly moves against this position, the case for an Italophone literature has been made in the early 1990s

(Marchand) and later bashed for reflecting “standard notions of culture” and “the old nationalist belief in emigration as a program of territorial expansion” (Verdicchio 95).

From another viewpoint, it has been argued that Italian emigration has produced “very little and unknown literature in Italian [to be considered] by now, as a sign of the past … a relic to be collected and saved” next to, and overshadowed by, the immigrants‟ literary production (Gnisci 80, my translation and emphasis). I believe than whenever a space for

22 critical confrontation opens up, disciplinary boundaries need to be rethought and made porous and susceptible to alterations, which explains my decision not to impose a monolingual restriction onto a dissertation focusing on liminal spaces and crossings.

Thus, the journey between Italy and North America will start, in Chapter 1, titled

“Moving in Suspension,” with Ebe Cagli Seidenberg‟s Ciclo dell’esilio obbligato, which she wrote after leaving Rome due to Mussolini‟s 1938 racial laws and whose discovery is evidence of the original quality of my research.9 In particular, I will investigate the poetics of “suspension” that she elaborated in three novels of the cycle, Il Tempo dei

Dioscuri (1980), Le sabbie del silenzio (1975), and Come ospiti: Eva ed altri (1991). The first novel is autobiographical and reconstructs the relationship between Ebe and her brother Corrado Cagli, a noted Italian painter who shared with the author the traumatic experience of exile before returning to Italy in the immediate post-war years. Ebe remained instead in the U.S. where she moved to California with her husband and started her literary career. Political constraints and personal choices determine the intersections of these two stories while also marking their differences. Through its comparative lens (in terms of gender), and its interdisciplinary movement between literature and painting, this work shows the effects of displacement and suspension on one‟s sense of personal and national identity. The narrator‟s “hybrid” being and positioning is embodied in the visual representation of a mannequin-man on a threshold (“Lo Sgombero,” “The move out”), which I will use to discuss the migrant liminal identity and gender relations. Le sabbie del silenzio and Come ospiti, through their female Italian narrators, focus on the “fractured” suspended identities of female refugees, and the resulting difficulty of voicing the traumas of exile and persecution. In the former, silence and incommunicability penetrate

23 the relationships among the women of a scattered Italian Jewish family while also defining the precarious nature of the transnational ties that the narrator, as a refugee, establishes in the U.S. The latter portrays the life of a small community of intellectual refugees from Europe gathering in Berkeley, California, with an emphasis on female relations and the cumbersome, even tragic, role of memory and social pressures for some of them. Deliberately written in Italian, but intertwined with the Jewish tradition and that of other cultures, Ebe Cagli Seidenberg‟s works reveal unfamiliar and interesting aspects of the literature of the Italian diaspora, urging a reflection on the preservation of historical memory in Italy.

In Chapter 2, “Stubborn Relics,” I will analyze Frank Paci‟s fictional novels Black

Madonna (1982) and Italian Shoes (2002) to explore generational liminality, and in particular, the difficult negotiation between the preservation and the reinvention of cultural traditions faced by Italian migrants‟ children in post-World War II Canada.

Another pair of siblings, Joey and Marie Barone, lies at the core of Black Madonna, a novel known for its depiction of immigrant women and feminist ideas. Published only two years after Il Tempo dei Dioscuri, it is written from a post-migrant perspective. In this story, the points of reference of the migratory journey are Italy and Canada, where the author, born in Pesaro in 1948, emigrated with his parents in 1952. In contrast to the

Caglis‟, the Barones‟ departure is due to economic reasons, and the connection of Joey and Marie to Italy is filtered through their parents, Adamo and Assunta, and the local community of Italian immigrants. The novel recounts the crisis that the death of Adamo causes on his maladjusted wife Assunta, the black madonna, and their two Canadian-born children. Intergenerational miscommunication is one of the main themes of the book,

24 especially evident in the mother-daughter relationship. I will explore Paci‟s post-migrant recovery and reinvention of Italian identity through his particular treatment of “relics” as both dead objects (markers for de Certeau‟s “places”) and signifying practices (opening symbolic “spaces”). And in the analysis of Italian Shoes, centered on the return journey to Italy of the aspiring writer Mark Trecroci, I will suggest that the fundamental ambivalence of relics pervades Paci‟s construction of the writing space, a site of devotion to and emancipation from the migrant working-class parents‟ culture.

In Chapter 3, “Embodying Liminality,” I will turn to Kym Ragusa‟s The Skin

Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging (2006) to investigate how from a position of racial liminality the author challenges homogeneous notions of Italian national identity as white. Ragusa writes about her ancestor‟s migrations to the USA and her growing up in New York City as a biracial girl, born to an African American mother and a Southern Italian American father. Drawing on her rich and troubled family heritage, Kym Ragusa addresses issues of geographical and cultural proximity between

African Americans and Southern Italians, and illustrates the latter‟s social construction of a white identity in the U.S. through the “white flight” from the inner city to the suburbs.

This desire for whiteness reminds us of the historically negative perception of the

Southern Italians outside of (and inside) Italy resulting from a long-standing discrimination theorized, within Italy, more than a century ago. By connecting private and public memory through writing, Ragusa engages with notions of race and belonging in the attempt to negotiate the distance between her two grandmothers, Gilda and Miriam, who represent two Southern diasporas, distinct but both originating in the Mediterranean.

I will pay particular attention to the physical journey from Harlem to Palermo that frames

25 the memoir as a personal narrative of return and cultural bridging. Through her trip to

Sicily, Ragusa strives to establish a transnational and cross-racial view of the South that I will examine with Cassano‟s “meridian thinking” in mind, while I will also point to the link that, although marginally, she creates between emigration and immigration.

And finally, the journey between Italy and North America will conclude on the coasts of the Adriatic Sea to reflect, through Gianni Amelio‟s Lamerica (1994), on the shifting role of Italy in current global migrations, and on contemporary perceptions of national identity. Inspired by the 1991 massive exodus of Albanians into Puglia and by his family‟s experience of emigration to the Americas, Amelio connects immigration and emigration to demythologize the notion of “Lamerica” as a land of opportunity and success. Rather than race, it is the logic of economic exploitation that regulates the relationships between Italians and Albanians in the film. However, when the Italian businessman Gino is stripped of the visible signs of his Italianness, he becomes part of the same crowd of migrants heading to Italy. Then, the physical voyage across the

Adriatic Sea takes on a symbolic meaning and the interplay of near and far, departure and return, is acted out again, as in the other texts, to contest rigid configurations of national identity. Rather than providing a comprehensive analysis of the film, on which an extensive critical literature already exists, I will use it to elucidate the deconstructive approach adopted throughout the dissertation. Its goal is to open up new areas of discussion among different aesthetic spaces as well as past and present migratory trajectories, and to interrogate disciplinary boundaries, which are yet another manifestation of liminality. Speaking from within Italian Studies and at the crossroad with other disciplines, I will in my conclusions offer some thoughts on the potential

26 contribution that the model of “moving thresholds” can bring to a future-oriented approach to migration and Italian identity, suggesting, for instance, a reworking of the concept of archive.

Notes

1. According to the Italian national statistical Institute (ISTAT), the resident population of Italy totaled 60,045,068 at the beginning of 2009. See ISTAT in the list of works cited.

2. See Caritas/Migrantes, Dossier Statistico Immigrazione 2009 in the list of works cited.

3. Among the other factors, Tirabassi mentions: the formation of regional governments that have promoted contacts with the communities of local emigrants residing outside of Italy; the question of the Italian vote abroad; the issue of the repatriation of Latin Americans of Italian descent; and a growing attention in Europe, and in the media, to topics related to global migrations (7).

4. Lionnet and Shih propose a horizontal approach that considers minority cultures as much in relation to each other as to the majority cultures in order to move beyond the vertical analyses of early postcolonial theory that focus on majority/minority relations and domination/resistance patterns. The latter, for Lionnet and Shih, seem inadequate to address more complex practices of cultural hybridization that are characteristic of our time of globalization. In my understanding of “minor transnationalism,” I am however aware of the tensions between the national and the global, because, as Saskia Sassen writes, “[f]or today‟s globalizing dynamics to have the transformative capacities they evince entails far deeper imbrications with the national – whether governments, firms, legal systems, or citizens – than prevailing analyses allow us to recognize” (Introduction, unpaged).

5. For a “philosophy of the threshold” that combines the ideas of transition and stasis of the dialectical process, and applies them to Walter Benjamin‟s thought, see Costa.

6. For a critique of Turner‟s liminality, see Rapport and Overing 229-36. By opening up spaces for contestation and re-creation (also in a “ludic” sense), liminality constitutes a fruitful theoretical tool across disciplines. On liminality and the intersections between anthropology, literary studies and cultural theory, see Ashley. An analysis of the transformative power of liminality in contemporary literary texts (specifically, from South Africa) is provided in Viljoen and Van der Merwe. On liminality and performance, see Bell, especially chapter 5, “Performing Culture.”

7. For an investigation of this relationship and of the sociopolitical implications underlying the use of space in contemporary urban contexts, see Lussault, L’homme spatial.

8. For a sampling of materials that embrace this connection, from different angles and to various degrees, see: the sociological studies of Bonifazi and Pugliese; the theoretical premises and cultural analyses of Teresa Fiore 2002, 2006; Graziella Parati 1999, 2005; Laura Ruberto;

Pasquale Verdicchio; and the edited volumes ItaliAfrica by Sante Matteo, and Borderlines, by Burns and Polezzi.

9. The absence of aprioristic constraints, along with some luck on my side, has eventually revealed itself a rewarding move. During my year at Stanford University as a Visiting Exchange Scholar, while browsing through the Green Library, I came across the novels of an almost unknown Jewish Italian-born female writer whose life-story and works inspired me to write the first chapter of this dissertation on her. The discovery of Ebe Cagli Seidenberg‟s eight books, which are part of the “unknown literature in Italian” evoked above, has been one of the most exciting aspects of my doctoral research. Finding myself first at Stanford and later in Berkeley, where this author spent over forty years of her life, allowed me to research the archives of the two main institutions in the area, and to retrieve some information about her life from some of the people who knew her personally.

CHAPTER 1

Moving in Suspension: Ebe Cagli Seidenberg’s Journeys between Italy and America

In this first chapter, I will explore Italian national identity through the category of suspension, which I will refer to the historical expulsion of the Italian Jews under

Fascism, and to the poetics of liminality that the Italian Jewish writer Ebe Cagli

Seidenberg elaborated as a result of her own experience of exile and suspension between worlds.

In 1938, Mussolini‟s government approved the so-called racial laws against the

Jewish community that had been present in Italy for centuries and totaled over forty thousand in a population of forty-three million. In July, a manifesto signed by ten Italian scientists declared that Jews did not belong to the Italian race, and in the following months a series of discriminatory measures were put into effect. The Jews were deprived of the civil rights granted to Italian citizens: they could not attend public schools, own property over a certain value, work in public offices and banks, practice their profession, or mix with the “pure Italian race” through marriage. They were also suspended from their academic appointments, which forced many scientists and intellectuals to leave Italy and seek refuge in countries like the United States, Switzerland, France, England, and

Belgium. Among the six thousand Italian Jews that emigrated were Emilio Segrè, Bruno

Zevi, Arnaldo Momigliano, Enrico Fermi, Giuseppe Levi, and his assistant Rita Levi-

Montalcini.1 The latter, as a woman, also had to struggle with a patriarchal society that assigned to women the subaltern role of wives and mothers and thus considered unsuitable for them to pursue the medical profession that she had chosen. Today, Rita

Levi-Montalcini is respected as a world-renowned scientist and her political role as senator for life in the Italian Senate testifies to her strong ties with her native country.

Anti-Semitism has nevertheless weighed upon these ties, making her feel connected with the Jewish victims of Fascism, and distant, for instance, from those Italian emigrants whom she met after the war in St. Louis, Missouri, and who identified their patriotic feeling with the Fascist ideology.2 Rita Levi-Montalcini‟s life course, the experience of exile due to the racial laws, the long American parenthesis punctuated by frequent journeys to Italy, and the permanent return to the native land, call to mind the biographical path of another Italian Jewish woman much less famous but just as fascinating, Ebe Cagli Seidenberg.

With this chapter, I intend to give visibility to her exile and analyze some aspects of her literary production, which is directly linked to that experience and has so far received inadequate critical attention. My analysis will focus on three of the five novels comprised in Ciclo dell’esilio obbligato (Cycle of the Forced Exile, 1975-91): Il Tempo dei Dioscuri (1980, The Time of the Dioscuri), Le sabbie del silenzio (1975, The Sands of

Silence), and Come ospiti: Eva ed altri (1991, As Guests: Eva and Others), while Gente sul Pacifico (1982, People on the Pacific) and Quando i santi marceranno (1983, When the Saints Go Marching In) will be briefly considered in the beginning of the last section.

The first two sections are devoted to Il Tempo dei Dioscuri, an autobiographical novel in

30 which the first-person female narrator embarks on an uneasy task, as Giuliano Manacorda observes in the introduction: comparing her experience of exile in America to her brother‟s, Corrado Cagli, a central figure in the family and a noted Italian painter.

Organized in six parts (plus one that collects letters and other materials), this novel tells about the fast and disruptive transition from a protected life in Rome before the racial laws to the flight to the United States and the subsequent war years. In the new country,

Ebe is a refugee student while Corrado joins the army as an American citizen. At the end of the war, he permanently returns to Rome while his sister settles in California with her husband.

By adopting the anthropological concept of liminality, I will first consider the relations between exile, identity, and the construction of a poetics of suspension in Il

Tempo dei Dioscuri, where suspension defines the uncomfortable position of the uprooted individual, but also configures a space of cultural negotiation. As such, I will claim that the writing space is the site in which, overcoming silence, the author articulates a female voice, also by appropriating her brother‟s artwork. The second section will examine suspension as it is reflected in the textual movement between literature and painting. I will use the image of Lo Sgombero, which the author chose for the cover of Il

Tempo dei Dioscuri, to investigate the migratory aesthetics of the novel and the political and cultural issues that it raises also with regard to mobility, as we know it today. I will argue that starting from her own position of suspension the author developed an approach to art and human experience that challenges monolithic views of national identity.

Visual and literary representation are uniquely bound together in Il Tempo dei

Dioscuri. The former is embedded in the latter not as an ancillary means that reinforces

31 the stance expressed through writing but to confront it with another point of view. As this parallel representation is specifically linked to the two protagonists, Ebe and Corrado, and to their approaches to life, exile, and artistic creation, it is not surprising that literature trumps (but not excludes) painting in the other volumes of Ciclo dell’esilio obbligato. Apart from this, a number of elements sustain the unity of the entire cycle, such as: the overarching theme of the displaced subject, its testimonial quality, the formal choice of the novel (short or long), and so forth. Throughout the cycle, the focus of narration gradually shifts from familial relationships rooted in the Italian context to transnational alliances (or “communitas,” to evoke Turner‟s term) forming in America as a consequence of what Ebe Cagli often named “lo strappo delle radici” (“uprooting”), something that many of her refugee characters have in common. In turn, this transition from family to transnational ties carries along a series of questions about the reconfiguration of an Italian Jewish identity outside of Italy: how does an Italian Jew, escaping a dictatorship, reorganize her/is life in the diaspora? How do national politics affect family dynamics and spark opposite feelings toward Italy? What does it mean to be

Italian and Jewish in a transnational arena? Which tokens of italianità are displayed (or concealed) in Ebe Cagli Seidenberg‟s writing? Why are these signs of continuity with

Italy so central even in the last work of the cycle where Italian (or Italian American) settings or characters are almost absent? What is the role of the narrator and of the Italian language and literary tradition in this production?

I will approach these questions above all in the last two sections by drawing some intertextual connections between Il Tempo and the other books of Ciclo dell’esilio obbligato rather than proceeding to an extensive analysis of each of them. I will return to

32 the concept of suspension in its double connotation of unwelcome removal from a place and as space between worlds, a liminal space indeed, where individual, group, ethnic and national identities are constantly negotiated anew. In particular, the relevance of family relationships and the visual prominence of suspension, expressed by Lo Sgombero in Il

Tempo, will allow me to draw a parallel with Le sabbie del silenzio, the first novel of the series. The return of Anna, the narrator, from the Unites States to her dying mother in

Rome is the basic storyline of this book. However, in the three parts, the shift from the present of the narration to the past allows for an elaborate reconstruction of the family history, its lost Jewish identity, and its diasporic destiny. Even in this novel emerges a comparative view of the exilic experience, which this time is centered on two sisters,

Anna and Paola, both residents of the U.S. but holding profoundly different notions about life in America.

The motif of ethnic ties that runs through Il Tempo and Le sabbie will then introduce us to the American and transnational atmosphere of the later books. I will especially focus on Come ospiti: Eva ed altri and the connections between women that it portrays. Rather than being defined by movement between Italy and America, this novel is more a sort of “tableau vivant” of life among a group of uprooted subjects in the context of the Berkeley Hills, in California. The Italian narrator traces her own and the other “guests‟” process of adjustment to that social “frame” while revealing, in the second part, the destructive effects of silencing and social masking. Lastly, I will highlight how the author, through the deployment of Italian and foreign characters and cultural models, and by using a first-person narrator, couches the idea of a liminal literary space molded on a national tradition but set to achieve a transnational status.

1.1 COMMON DEPARTURES, SEPARATE RETURNS IN IL TEMPO DEI DIOSCURI

Ebe Cagli Seidenberg was born in Ancona, Italy, on the Adriatic Sea, on 23 February

1915 and raised in Rome in an upper middle class Jewish family which, like the majority of Italian Jews, considered itself assimilated. Both her parents were well-educated: her father, a businessman who had lost his fortune during World War I, was a professor of applied mathematics at a technical institute, while her mother worked as an editor of the

International Red Cross publications and published several novels and children‟s books under the pseudonym of Fiducia. Ebe was one of their five children, three daughters and two sons. She received her education in Rome (including a University degree) and left

Italy right after Mussolini‟s government passed the racial laws (in 1938). Thanks to the help of a relative, she was able to attend the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where she obtained her doctoral degree in Romance Languages, and met Abraham

Seidenberg, a mathematician who later became her husband and with whom she moved to Berkeley, California, in 1945.3 In the new setting, she started her literary activity under the supervision of Wallace Stegner, and in 1957 her first novel, Before the Cock Crows, was published by Little, Brown, and Company in English, under the pseudonym of

Bettina Postani. The several positive critical reviews that the book received in the US inspired the author to continue writing, but interestingly she chose to write her subsequent works all in Italian.4 This decision may be partly due to her frequent stays in

Italy since the 1960s or earlier, and eventually to her permanent move to Rome after her husband‟s death in the late 1980s. Her works amount to eight volumes of novels and short stories, five of which make up a “cycle” devoted to the theme of exile (Ciclo

34 dell’esilio obbligato), and are centered on experiences of deracination, marginalization, memory, and identity.

As I have tried to suggest in this brief introduction, suspension played a crucial part in Ebe Cagli Seidenberg‟s life; as such, it came to constitute a key concept in her texts with different meanings and through multiple manifestations. Il Tempo dei Dioscuri

(TD), originally published in 1980, focuses on the relationship between Ebe and her brother Corrado Cagli, a well-known painter and dedicatee of the novel. The two siblings shared the experience of exile in America, but while Corrado returned to Rome after serving in the US army during WWII, Ebe remained in California. Her work thus tells how these intersecting and eventually diverging trajectories redefined the siblings‟ original ties. In the text, which deals with the protagonists‟ vicissitudes between 1938 and the immediate post-war years, this relationship is introduced as one of mutual affection, but also of profound admiration for the brother, as the incipit and the first pages of the book suggest:

Ricordo: ero una bambina e lui un ragazzino. C‟erano alcuni anni tra noi due, non tanti, ma abbastanza perché io restassi tutta la vita “la sorella piccola”. Ma, a distanza d‟anni, eravamo nati lo stesso giorno, lo stesso mese: questo sembrava significativo a lui, che dava un senso magico a tante cose, e mi diceva: noi due abbiamo lo stesso segno dello zodiaco: i Pesci…. Ricordo: un giorno a scuola – avrò avuto otto o nove anni - … una [rondine] era caduta sul cornicione con un tonfo …. quella era la morte? Avevo saputo che si moriva, ma senza pensare ad un fatto tanto improbabile ... Lui, un adolescente, mi aveva spiegato con tono grave la sua convinzione che nulla muore e tutto si trasforma…. non avevo più avuto paura. Quel giorno avevo creato in lui il mio primo mito. (TD 13-16)

I remember: I was a girl and he was a kid. A few years separated us, not many, but enough to remain “the little sister” all my life. But although years apart, we had been born on the same day, the same month: this seemed meaningful to him, who would give a magical sense to many things, and would tell me: we have the

same birth sign: Pisces…. I remember: one day at school – I must have been eight or nine - … a [swallow] had plunked down on the ledge …. was it death? I had learned that one must die, but had not thought of such an improbable fact … He, an adolescent, had told me in a serious tone about his belief that nothing dies and everything changes…. I hadn‟t been afraid anymore. On that day, I had made him into my first myth.5

The life-long little sister considers her older brother as her “primo mito” and a myth maker at once. He is described as a volatile, sociable, vital, and talented young man who has a cosmic rather than religious faith, and attaches magical meanings to many things, not least of which the fact that his little sister shares with him the same day and month of birth. When he leaves the household to open his own art studio in Rome, near the

Capitolium Square and the equestrian statues of the Dioscuri (hence the title of the book), he surrounds himself with eccentric people that in his words immediately become

“Dramatis Personae, fabulous, and with exceptional fates” (19). As an adolescent, Ebe is fascinated by these characters and their stories, and is exposed to the blend of storytelling and painting that animates the life of the studio. The magic quality, or sense of

“splendore” that she derives from these encounters is heightened by the monumental surroundings she walks through to reach the studio.

Ero andata con l‟aspettativa di qualcosa di nuovo, strano e magico che lui mi comunicava. […] mentre salivo le scale che portavano alla piazzetta dei Dioscuri, quell‟attesa mi s‟era trasformata in un senso di splendore: mi veniva da quel cielo azzurro […] O da quelle due teste ricciute cortesemente piegate verso di me, dai due visi sorridenti? …tibi/gemelle Castor et gemelle Castoris… Come un omaggio avevo offerto il mio saluto […]. Quando lasciavo lo studio avevo la testa piena di nomi […]. Nomi ed episodi si confondevano con le immagini dei quadri: guerrieri a cavallo, gladiatori, Narciso […]. Penetrando in fantasia tanti mondi diversi, percorrevo lo stradone verso casa, appagata nella mia attesa: c‟era in me quello splendore. (17-21)

I had gone expecting something new, strange and magical that he conveyed to me. […] while I was going up the stairs leading to Dioscuri‟s small square, waiting had turned into a sense of splendor: could it come from the blue sky […] Or from those two curly-haired heads gently leaning towards me, from the two smiling faces? … to you/twins Castor and Pollux… I had offered my greeting as a tribute […]. When I would leave the studio I had my head full of names […]. Names and episodes mingled with the images in the paintings: warriors on horseback, gladiators, Narcissus […]. Penetrating through fantasy lots of different worlds, I would walk the wide road home, satisfied with my wait: that splendor was inside me.

It is important that the title references the Dioscuri, rather than for instance “via Monte

Tarpeo,” where the studio was located. Those sculptures matter to the author for the power of their symbolism more than for their material appearance: they well suit the purpose of impressing a mythical aura onto the tie between Ebe and Corrado. Siblings born on the same day (not year), they are introduced as inseparable as Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri of Greek mythology (from Dioskouroi „sons of Zeus‟), also known as the

“Heavenly Twins.” Born to Leda after her seduction by Zeus, and brothers of Helen, they were different by nature (Castor was mortal, while Pollux was immortal), but partook in a common fate as combatants and travelers. According to A Dictionary of Phrase and

Fable, “at Pollux‟s request they shared his immortality between them, spending half their time below the earth in Hades and the other half on Olympus. They are often identified with the constellation Gemini” (“Dioscuri”). Nevertheless, the unfolding narrative of Il

Tempo shows that Ebe and Corrado are indeed separable subjects with different worldviews and fates. In other words, “the time of the Dioscuri” is the time of their inseparability, in Rome, before the trauma of the racial laws, which marks the beginning of their overlapping but diverse paths of suspension.

The initial description of a comfortable and protective sense of home works as a premise and a counterpoint to the instability of the dark years that would soon follow.

The perception of peril is expressed in one of Corrado‟s drawings (inserted in the text) that strongly impresses Ebe when she sees it upon her brother‟s return to Rome from a trip abroad: a powerful David, threatened from behind by a gloomy figure, displays a defiant attitude while lifting his arm and showing the beheaded giant Goliath.

“Ti ricordi la frase della Bibbia? E se Saul ne uccise mille, e Davide ne uccise diecimila”. “Non la conoscevo”. Non staccavo gli occhi dal Davide. “Ti piace?” “Molto, più di tutti”. “Allora, te lo do…. Imparalo questo motto. Forse dovremo ricordarlo spesso”. “Che vuoi dire?” “Non hai letto certi articoli nei giornali?” “No”. Mia madre non s‟occupava di politica e mi aveva comunicato quella mancanza d‟interesse. (24)

“Do you remember the passage in the Bible? And if Saul killed one thousand, and David killed ten thousand.” “I didn‟t know it.” I could not take my eyes off of David. “Do you like it?” “Very much, most of all.” “Then, take it…. Learn this motto. Perhaps we‟ll have to recall it often.” “What do you mean?” “Didn‟t you read those articles in the newspapers?” “No.” My mother wasn‟t interested in politics and had passed that lack of interest onto me.

Ebe is mesmerized by the drawing, but only later on in the narration does she clearly realize that the triumphant David better represents Corrado‟s mature confidence than her own uncertain and juvenile view of the world. In this initial section, the focus is on the gloomy figure behind David, and its function of “avvertimento” about the future. This

“warning” turns into a sad reality a few months later when, while on vacation in the

Versilia area, in the town square the sister finds herself facing a pink poster announcing the exclusion of the Jews from the schools of the Kingdom of Italy (“Tutti i professori e gli studenti di razza ebraica sono esclusi dalle scuole del Regno…” 27). The message is in itself an example of suspension, as it clearly draws a line of division and creates a distance, discriminates and imposes a removal, pointing to one of the several measures against the Jews mentioned above.

The experience of exile, which occupies the next three sections, at least in the beginning, marks a separation of the siblings, which proves to be crucial to the narrator‟s process of defining self-identity. At the age of twenty, she boards a ship by herself headed to the United States, unprepared for a land whose language is unfamiliar to her, and to a city, Baltimore, whose streets and skies appear somber and quite hard to associate with the roads to liberty that she had imagined before her arrival. The initial difficulty to communicate in English or even to read a map, something that she had never had to use in her hometown, and the realization of being suddenly judged as “helpless” and worth of compassion, are humbling experiences that cannot be comfortably reconciled with the sense of triumph deriving from the drawing of David and Goliath that she has brought with her to the new country.

In particular, she receives a harsh critique of her protected Italian lifestyle and

Fascist education by her adviser at Johns Hopkins, Professor Kucher, a European philologist who shares with his young student the status of refugee: “Questo stile retorico, con un facile virtuosismo, zeppo delle formule della così detta scuola estetica, le fa la spia: lei è il prodotto dell‟educazione intellettuale fascista” ( “This rhetorical style, with a

39 facile virtuosity, packed with the formulas of the so-called aesthetic school, betrays you: you are the product of the Fascist intellectual education”; 45). What he proposes to her is, instead, a model of mental discipline in the approach to the work of art, based on the principle of “tabula rasa” or blank slate, that is, the abandonment of cultural pre- conceptions, and the valorization of the human experience embedded in a work (“toccare quel pezzo di esperienza umana che l‟artista ha messo nella sua opera e che è latente in essa,” “to touch that piece of human experience that artists have placed in their work and is hidden in it”; 49, emphasis in the original). On the one hand, Kucher‟s “lezione d‟umiltà” (“lesson of humility”) guides Ebe in her studies on the symbolic value of objects (res) in Boccaccio‟s Decameron (on this text I will return in the last section of the chapter). On the other hand, although didactic in nature, Kucher‟s teachings about the modesty of the interpreter influence the narrator‟s reflection on her own experience of humbleness in everyday life in the new reality. The result is a re-conceptualization of her past as deception: deception of its splendor, of the myths, of her sense of the marvelous during her visits to the art studio in Rome before the war. When she fully realizes that she has nothing in common with the valiant warrior David, she takes the drawing off the wall and locks it in a drawer.

Avevo creduto anch‟io d‟essere ottimista. Ma avevo solo preso quell‟ottimismo a prestito da una natura tanto più ricca della mia [Corrado]. A un tratto m‟ero voltata contro il Davide così fiero, tremando di ribellione. C‟è chi può e c‟è chi non può, avrei voluto gridargli, c‟è chi ha in sé la gloria del demiurgo e c‟è chi ha solo una sorte modesta. Ma allora non dovevi, non dovevi…. Avevo staccato le puntine con dita caute, per non sciupare il foglio, l‟avevo riposto in un cassetto […]. Davanti al cassetto chiuso tremavo, premendo un pugno contro le labbra per soffocare… cosa? Un lamento? Un urlo? Dovevo dimenticare tutto: il cielo dietro i Dioscuri, il grifone di bronzo sulla porta che m‟apriva mondi meravigliosi […].

Non ero pronta a morire; allora per poter rassegnarmi al mio destino modesto, per accettare questa vita grigia, dovevo dimenticare tutto: dovevo soffocare in me lo splendore. (56, emphasis added)

I had believed that I too was optimistic. But I had only borrowed that optimism from a far richer nature than mine [Corrado‟s]. Suddenly, I had turned against the proud David, trembling with rebellion. Some can and others cannot, I would have wanted to shout at him, some have the glory of a demiurge inside themselves and others only have a modest fate. But then, you shouldn‟t have, you shouldn‟t have…. I had removed the pins with cautious fingers, not to ruin the piece of paper, and I had placed it in a drawer […]. I was trembling before the locked drawer, pressing a fist against my lips to suppress… what? A moan? A shout? I had to forget everything: the sky behind the Dioscuri, the bronze griffon on the door that introduced me to wonderful worlds […]. I wasn‟t ready to die; so, to give in to my modest fate, to accept this dull life, I had to forget everything: I had to suppress the splendor inside me.

In this dramatic scene, Ebe performs a revealing and powerful (although painful) act through which she rejects a vision of the world that does not belong to her, and that she has naively borrowed from Corrado. At this moment of crisis, she briefly brings up the unsettling question of fleeing, which still looms in her mind. By saying “Ma allora non dovevi, non dovevi…” she seems to regret her decision to leave Italy, a decision that she may have taken in order to follow Corrado‟s steps. For him, fleeing is, from the outset, the only solution: “Non c‟è scelta. Mi disprezzerei se accettassi il ghetto quando ho la possibilità di evadere” (“There is no choice. I would despise myself if I accepted the ghetto when I have the opportunity to escape”) whereas Ebe is afraid of leaving “così allo sbaraglio” (“into the fray”; 35). Through these two attitudes, the writer highlights the subjective dimension of the migratory process that I underlined in the introduction. I claim that in the novel, while both Ebe and Corrado exercise their “right of flight,” to use

Mezzadra‟s category (Diritto di fuga), only Corrado acts as a “subject” of his movement, fully responsible for it. His is a political choice, an esodo (“exodus”) in Virno‟s words, an

41 abandonment of social oppression that is not a “negative gesture” bur rather implies affirmative action and responsibility (55), as the literary representation of his intense life outside of Italy illustrates. On the contrary, Ebe submits to movement, accepts it passively. As a result, the uncertainty about the real necessity of fleeing aggravates her sense of inadequacy and vulnerability in the new country. However, she is “not ready to die.” And if a new beginning requires resistance and a radical reconfiguration of the past, then she must also rebel to her brother, by repositioning her rapport with him, whom she evidently identifies with the proud David.

Suspension, I maintain, is the new horizon that the narrator embraces in her life after dismissing the drawing of David. The concept of suspension contains its previous meaning of removal and separation from the native land along with the familiar faces, objects and rituals, but also expands it to define the liminal position of the uprooted individual and, ultimately, to configure liminality as a space of negotiation. As I suggested in the introduction, in Victor Turner‟s anthropological model (based on Van

Gennep‟s theorization of the rites de passage), liminality indicates a transitional phase in which the “threshold people” are “neither here nor there” in the social structure, so they possess ambiguous characteristics.

In the context of Il Tempo dei Dioscuri, an image of suspension as liminality is provided by the drawing Lo Sgombero, literally “the move,” completed by the narrator‟s brother after he joins her in Baltimore for some time before the breakout of World War

II. In Italian, “sgombero” means the act of emptying and moving out of a place, but it also has the negative connotation of evacuating dangerous areas, a concept sadly

42 resonating in the history of Jews. In the novel, the title of this pastel drawing actually refers to the strange character that embodies the action of clearing out, a clumsy

uomo-manichino con la testa seminascosta da un viluppo di stracci, un torso fatto d‟un piccolo cassettone, d‟un orologio a pendolo, d‟una gabbia, d‟uno specchio, tutti tenuti in bilico tra le braccia che, contratte dallo sforzo, finivano in due rossi artigli. (TD 81)

mannequin-man with his head half hidden by a tangle of rags, his torso made up of a small drawer, a pendulum-clock, a cage, a mirror, all balanced between his arms that, contorted from the effort, ended in two red claws.

The physical effort due to the weight of the subject‟s load is amplified by Sgombero‟s unwillingness to leave the place he has inhabited so far. Meaningfully, his legs do not appear to follow the movement of his head and the rest of his body, but instead they go backward, thus producing an effect of distortion and ambiguity in this character and the drawing at large. “Poveraccio, deve andare avanti, ma ha tanta voglia di tornare indietro”

(“Poor thing, he must go ahead, but he has so much desire to go back”) says the painter while examining his own piece of artwork, too Cubist and too pathos-ridden in his own judgment.6 On the contrary, it is precisely this latter quality that evokes pity, sadness, and suffering, which allows his sister to sympathize with Sgombero and to rescue the drawing from being trashed, a gesture that, as she recognizes at the end of the narrative, was instinctive as well as symbolic. Compassion and deformity are traits of that humble mannequin-man that she can relate to her own liminal position. Thus, by saving that image, in a way, she recuperates a reflection of her own identity, wounded, fractured,

“con la [sua] inutile fedeltà al paese che [l‟]aveva respinta” (“with [her] useless loyalty to the country that had rejected [her]”; 115) and yet longing for a sense of being and

43 stability in the new country, suspended between worlds that she painfully and precariously holds together as Sgombero does with his load of objects. On this drawing and its key role in the migratory aesthetics of the novel I will expand in the second section of this chapter.

As part of the author‟s bridging operation, the account of the following years

(1940-45) is not articulated solely by the first-person narrative voice but is made more vivid through the insertion of excerpts or entire letters signed by Corrado and addressed to his sister Ebe. Along with a number of poems, drawings and pictures, these letters bear witness to the destitution, solitude and humbleness experienced by the painter during his five military campaigns with the U.S. army which brought him from the valleys and deserts of the West coast of the United States to England, Germany, and eventually back to Italy. Writing from Fort Lewis, Washington, on 27 May 1942,7 Corrado observed that what he tiredly continued to call his life was but a “sequence of interruptions,” and that

“if you want to be a good soldier…you ough to forget yourselfe „by the numbers‟” (sic.

TD 212).8 Therefore, the painter-poet, dispossessed of his past and unable to forecast any prediction in a time of war, is reduced to a condition of nakedness and moral distress.

Besides provoking an internal crisis, a disconnection “between you and yourself,” life in the army “digs a channel…between yourself and your circle,” so that the act of writing to one‟s dearest persons suffers from an impasse “because it looks like you don‟t have much to say” when, in fact, there is “too much to tell” (212). The idea that emerges here, and even more explicitly in other letters by the brother, is that the resumption of the dialogue started long before the war years between Corrado and Ebe can only take place by means of a physical encounter and an oral exchange, rather than an epistolary one.

However, after a series of deferments, when this encounter finally occurs, in Rome, during Ebe‟s second visit to Italy since the end of the war, it proves a complete disappointment for her. “Mi sembrava che mio fratello avesse sempre bisogno di tanta gente intorno, ma che schivasse un incontro personale, un dialogo. Evitava proprio quello di cui ero affamata” (“It seemed to me that my brother always needed a lot of people around, but that he was avoiding a personal encounter, a dialogue. He was avoiding that which I was thirsting for”; 177). Through the adjective “hungry,” Ebe does not simply voice a desire for ordinary conversation, but rather a more basic material need, as if words were food. She desperately needs that private space of discussion in order to reconnect with Corrado through their common experience of exile, but also to recover her own roots and sense of belonging. And the same need is implied in the “sguardo affamato” (“starving gaze”; 189) that Ebe gives to Corrado, and to the faces and places that she wishes she could bring with her.

The reason behind the breakdown of the communication between the siblings fundamentally hinges on the different meaning of their notion of return, as it emerges from the fifth section of the book (“Per ritrovare i visi familiari,” “To find the old familiar faces”). With the end of the war, the brother‟s exile comes to a final conclusion, and his re-incorporation into the Italian society is totally in line with his conviction that his roots are there: “Non si può fare violenza alla propria individualità. Un essere umano

è come un albero: soffre a essere trapiantato. Ognuno di noi ha il suo paesaggio” (“You cannot violate you own individuality. A human being is like a tree: it suffers when it‟s transplanted. Everyone has their own landscape”; 166).9

Within the perspective of suspension as liminality adopted in this chapter,

Corrado‟s return is consistent with the concept of liminality as a transitional phase, chronologically limited, between separation and re-aggregation, as theorized by Van

Gennep and expanded by Turner. He now re-enters the Italian society as a Maestro; as his mother puts it: “Il nostro nome … Avevamo dovuto nasconderlo e adesso lo vedi in tutte le città d‟Italia” (“Our name … We were forced to hide it and now you see it in every

Italian city”; 165). However, this return to the roots does not come without costs: to fully regain his identity as a painter and the mythopoetic qualities of his art, Corrado must free himself of the soldier that he used to be, and by extension, of his American experience.

America, to him, becomes part of a past that has certainly left a “trace” behind, although one that only reemerges into his life “nei modi più inaspettati” (“in the most unpredictable ways”; 185) as a product of involuntary memory. By exercising the art of forgetting, he consciously distances himself from that experience which does not exclude the possibility of a return to America “in occasione di qualche mostra, da turista” (“for some exhibit, as a tourist”; 186).

Interestingly, “come una turista” is the expression used by the siblings‟ mother, with an accusatory tone this time, to remark the “easy” choice of Ebe: “Vai, sposi un americano, diventi cittadina americana. Addio al passato, addio a tutto. Torni così, come una turista” (“Go, marry an American, and become an American citizen. Farewell to the past, to everything. And you return as a tourist”; 166). Although prompted by maternal affection and sense of loss, such a judgment points to a condition of exclusion and foreignness that the narrator truly experiences when she first returns from California after the war. Even the simple practices of everyday life show her that she has lost some of the

Italian habits she used to have, and that in the eyes of the people around her, she now appears as a person without a recognizable background. The multiple places of her exile sound like empty names to them, whose common hardships during the Nazi occupation reinforce their sense of community, rooted in a specific and familiar geography. The perspective of returning to Italy to find the old familiar faces and to feel whole again is dismantled by Ebe‟s realization of being “un prodotto ibrido” (“a hybrid product”; 167), a subject whose identity has been shaped by two cultures often at odds with each other but neither of which can be erased. In contrast to Corrado‟s, her return is not definitive, but only one of many journeys between Italy and America, here and there, which questions the notion of liminality as a temporary phase and reconfigures it as a potentially permanent geographical and socio-cultural space or “state,” to use Turner‟s term.

Therefore, the author uses a comparative lens to emphasize, from a female perspective, the close association between the diasporic experience and the suspension of identity that it produces, making the latter a characteristic of the migrants‟ condition (Mezzadra

Diritto 65).

The risk implied in this in-between position is that the female protagonist, as a refugee turned migrant, may never achieve the social recognition from her former community that she longs for, thus remaining invisible and ambiguous in her role of “il

Maestro‟s sister.” Indeed, in the novel, her attempts to communicate with her mother, her relatives and friends are unsuccessful, because dialogues slide into monologues where she only functions as a listener, overwhelmed by their voices and unable to articulate the complexity of her own situation. Even when she meets Corrado in Rome and realizes that her own view of reality, influenced by her experience of migration and alienation, clashes

47 with his, she is unable or unwilling to express her dissent aloud. Instead, I argue that writing becomes a privileged space where she can break her silence and make her voice heard. Through writing Ebe Cagli Seidenberg reinvented a dialogue with her brother in which she integrated and reinterpreted his artwork to voice two different stories of migration. In particular, I maintain that without adopting a subversive perspective, she used her own condition of suspension to contest his viewpoint, knowingly oblivious of its migratory past and committed to re-construct a sense of one self.

As Trinh T. Minh-ha reminds us, “entry into or exit from refugee status is, in many ways, neither voluntary nor simply involuntary” (“An Acoustic Journey” 4). What is crucial is the ability of the subject to reject the rigidity of the naming process imposed on it (“refugee,” “voluntary migrant,” “tourist,” and so on). Indeed, “if, despite their relation, [refuse as] noun and [refuse as] verb inhabit the two very different … worlds of designated and designator, the space in between them remains a surreptitious site of movement and passage whose open, communal character makes exclusive belonging … undesirable, if not impossible” (6). The novelty of Ebe Cagli Seidenberg‟s perspective derives from her peculiar way of dealing with her sense of loss (“senso della perdita”

185); rather than reverting to an “original” self, Ebe asserts her right to plurality: “[e]ro una formica. Volevo serbare tutto, tener vivo il passato e fonderlo nel presente; volevo riunire in un delicato equilibrio i due mondi che m‟avevano formata” (“I was an ant. I wanted to preserve everything, keep the past alive and blend it in the present; I wanted to bring together in a delicate balance the two worlds that had shaped me”; 192). Her attempt “d‟abbracciare troppe cose” (“to hold too many things”) like Sgombero produces a composite identity, reached painfully, which, at the end, she would give up to recede to

48 a “guscio d‟infanzia fittizia” (“shell of fictitious childhood”; 199), if this could bring

Corrado back to life. But this conclusion only confirms that Ebe is not the “little sister” anymore, as she has grown into a woman with an independent standpoint, different from and capable of confronting her male counterpart and his drive to oneness. Moreover, through her recognition of being a composite, “hybrid” being, Ebe challenges the treatment reserved by the official Italian culture to Italy‟s many migrations, a process reminiscent, on a much smaller scale, of Corrado‟s effort to forget.

I am not suggesting that Ebe‟s conceptualization of suspension is a radical or systematic attempt to neutralize self-fulfilling and reassuring perceptions of national and cultural belonging. She never denies that “[o]gnuno di noi ha il suo paesaggio” (“each of has has their own landscape”) or that transplantation causes sufferance to the human being, as Corrado states. In fact, her own condition of suspension is undesired. What I argue is that Ebe‟s migratory imagination raises the problem of the encounter of the subject suspended between worlds with the individual solidly rooted in her/is own environment, like a tree. In other words, how does the logic of the threshold interact with the logic of the landscape? Or, what happens when Sgombero approaches a well grounded tree? In order to answer this question and understand its cultural and political implications, I will return to the image of Sgombero.

1.2 LO SGOMBERO AND THE MIGRATORY AESTHETICS OF IL TEMPO DEI DIOSCURI

In my analysis of Ebe Cagli Seidenberg‟s book, I have described Sgombero as an ambiguous character whose clumsiness and precarious balance resonates with the female

49 narrator‟s view of her own liminal position. This section focuses on that drawing as a defining element of the migratory aesthetics of the novel.

Mieke Bal suggests that “a topic does not make an aesthetic. What does make an aesthetic is the sentient encounter with subjects involved” (“Lost in Space” 26).10 This happens when the viewer, the spectator, or the user is engaged, even physically, by the artwork. In Bal‟s “migratory aesthetics,” the modifier “migratory” refers to the mobility of today‟s globalized world, in which migrants and migration are part of any society.

Consequently, the “aesthetic encounter is migratory if it takes place in the space of, on the basis of, and on the interface with, the mobility of people as a given” (23-4). The term

“migratory aesthetics” is a ground for experimentation rather than a concept, and its purpose is to investigate the political effectiveness of art. My goal is to pinpoint the presence of a migratory aesthetics in Il Tempo dei Dioscuri and to explore the possibility for this text to do political work by producing critical thinking about past and present mobility.

A first consideration regards the human spatiality of Lo Sgombero and the immediate identification of the narrator with the mannequin-man. The drawing portrays

Sgombero in the act of moving out: in the foreground, his large upper body overflowing with cumbersome composite objects and his legs following an equivocal trajectory; in the background, a disproportionately small room, with irregular blue walls and checkered floors, empty and ready to be vacated. To the viewer, Sgombero‟s movement appears uncomfortable and undesired because, as Corrado puts it: “[d]eve andare avanti, ma ha tanta voglia di tornare indietro” (“he must go ahead, but he has so much desire to go back”; TD 81). The overall effect is that Sgombero remains on the threshold between

50 inside and outside, past and future, the memory of provenance and the ongoing construction of a home somewhere.

For his particular position, Sgombero can be regarded as a metaphor of the migrant‟s liminal condition. Nevertheless, not all migrants would have the same kind of sentient encounter that Ebe experiences in the novel: her identification with Sgombero is instinctive, unexpected, immediate – it happens. She is involved with the subject of that drawing visually and emotionally, to the extent that she saves it from the wastepaper basket and keeps it with her. This aesthetic event is migratory precisely in the sense specified by Mieke Bal:

detached from the self-evident certainty of who and where we are, and tumbling inside the experience of someone else caught in a state of mobility which curiously imprisons him. Mobility as, paradoxically, a prison. (28)

It is evident that the imprisoning mobility represented in this artwork does not have a historical referent in the globalized world as we know it today. Rather, it might evoke the forcible movement of the political refugees and the Jews during the late Thirties or early

Forties. In spite of this distinction, I will try to argue that the idea of mobility as prison can be valid for both war-related and postmodern migratory experiences, by addressing the condition of Ebe‟s double marginality (in U.S. and Italy) in Il Tempo.

In the first part of the chapter, I presented Ebe‟s identification with Sgombero as a defining moment of independence and change in the relationship between her and

Corrado. However, her affinity with Sgombero also has several ties with the aesthetics of

Il Tempo. For one, it is intriguing that in a book where the centrality of time is

51 emphasized by the title and the unfolding of the narrative, the image of Sgombero, loaded with a sense of spatiality, appears on the book cover. This may suggest that the effects of the sentient encounter that took place in 1940 were powerful and long-lasting on Ebe

Cagli Seidenberg: she kept that drawing with her during her wanderings in the United

States, and forty years later she wrote a novel around and about it, and chose it for its cover. When the book was reprinted in 1996 to honor the twentieth anniversary of

Corrado Cagli‟s death, another drawing, Davide e Golia, took its place on the front cover, and it was transferred to the back cover. The internal motif of the dialogue between Ebe and Corrado was thus reinforced through this visual move.

Nonetheless, the prominence given to Sgombero by the author never feels diminished. In fact, in my view, it provides the reader with an interpretative key to access the text: Sgombero symbolizes mobility and imprisonment at the same time, and in this direction evolves the migratory aesthetics of Il Tempo dei Dioscuri. The conspicuous insertion of drawings, photographs, letters and magazine pages throughout and at the end of the book is perhaps the most tangible sign of its interdisciplinary movement.

Sometimes these visual materials are fully integrated in the narrative and support the written reconstruction of the exile and the war years: Davide e Golia, Lo Sgombero, several letters and poems by Corrado are some examples. Other times the images are interjected and briefly followed by a caption that ties them to the context of the narration without being commented on in the main text. Furthermore, the last part of the book, about one fifth of the total pages, is entirely devoted to six letters by Corrado, his war drawings and excerpts from The Caisson, a magazine circulating among the US soldiers during the war and which he contributed to with his illustrations.

The translations from English to Italian that accompany the original documents add to the complexity of Il Tempo: two languages intertwine to make public a private exchange and present it as a personal account of the effects of racial persecution, deracination and war on the individual. Reproducing Corrado‟s letters or the pages of The

Caisson, which only his sister Ebe owned, reveals the intention to deliver a first-hand source about the artist‟s military life, while the translations complement that depiction making it available to the Italian readership. The interplay of two or more languages in this and other volumes of Ciclo dell’esilio obbligato is not surprising considering the writer‟s decision to convey in Italian the intricacies, also linguistic, implied in the experience of exile outside of Italy.

The impact of displacement on language played a crucial role in Ebe Cagli

Seidenberg‟s writing style. While I will address this topic at length in the last section of the chapter, I wish to point out here the alleged source and goal of her style. In her works,

Seidenberg pursued what Massimo Bontempelli called “povertà conquistata” (“poverty obtained”) that is, a clear, simple, and essential style that can only be attained by getting rid of “the superfluous, the embellishing, the worthless.”11Such simplicity, also defined as “poverty” or “nakedness,” is not given by birth but proceeds from the trials of life and according to the subject‟s capacity for self discipline. Bontempelli, who was married to

Amelia Della Pergola, a sister of Ebe and Corrado‟s mother, certainly had some influence on the siblings‟ artistic undertakings. He had theorized the principles of “magic realism” during the second decade of the twentieth century, and Corrado and Ebe were familiar with many of the ideas condensed in that formula, such as: the invention of new myths after WWI; the imagination and its power to penetrate ordinary life and pervade it with a

53 magic atmosphere; the quest for the “elemental” and for a superior simplicity in art and literature; and so forth.12 Echoes of these notions are scattered throughout the pages of Il

Tempo and can be found, for instance, in Corrado‟s cult of myths or in the discipline that

Kucher imparts to Ebe with regard to the work of art and the art of writing. In that particular episode, Kucher condemns the falsity of art made out of pompous and void words disconnected from human experience of life because, as he maintains, it is the

“realtà della vita che agevola l‟accesso all‟altra [la realtà estetica], e forse ne è identica”

(“reality of life that facilitates the access to the other [the aesthetic reality], and perhaps identifies with it”; TD 49). Human and artistic experience are strictly connected in

Kucher‟s approach, which lays out Ebe Cagli Seidenberg‟s own aesthetic belief. Of her first novel, Wallace Stegner wrote: “She works directly in marble” to underscore the effectiveness of her essential style.13 In Il Tempo she adopted a language that combines precision in the characterization of people and ambiances, and a taste for symbolism and introspection, in order to denounce the trauma of forced exile, which in her view has not been explored in contemporary Italian literature, in spite of the many lives it affected (Il

Tempo, dust jacket).

Besides the “povertà conquistata” of her writing style, there is another, less visible, aspect of language that the author employed to achieve her goal of denunciation.

This has to do with the voice of the exile and imprisonment (in its metaphorical interpretation, according to Bal). Indeed, behind the movement between two or more languages, the novel raises the fundamental question of the possibility of performing the act of speech. From her first winter in Baltimore, Ebe grows more attentive to body language, because she comes from a different culture and immediately realizes that

54 people see her as a poor vulnerable refugee. As English is a new tool to handle, she focuses on imperceptible reactions to understand her own preoccupations and discern people‟s inner lives and anxieties: “una piega agli angoli delle labbra … un battere delle palpebre …un volgere del capo per nascondersi” (“a crease in the corners of the lips…a wink of the eyelids…a turn of the head to hide oneself”; 195). In other words, she uses vision rather than speech to exercise what she calls compassion, the ability to see and feel the suffering of another person coupled with the wish to relieve it. Compassion is, after all, the quality that she so much admires in Sgombero, humble enough to inspire that feeling and yet compassionate to the point of saving as many modest things as he can

(“così umile, quasi grottesco, tanto da poter ispirare compassione, cercava lui stesso, per compassione, di salvare tutte cose modeste” 194).

Body language becomes instrumental in Ebe‟s exploration of human relationships, but speech remains a problem. Ten years later, when she returns to Rome, to her “landscape” and to that acoustic surroundings that had largely contributed to shaping her identity, she fails to speak or, as I mentioned earlier, she is not asked to.

“Nessuno m‟aveva chiesto: „e l‟esilio? T‟è stato duro l‟esilio?‟ Nemmeno mia madre”

(“Nobody had asked me: „and your exile? Was your exile hard on you?‟ Not even my mother”; 167). Here, Ebe underlines the silence that wraps the parenthesis of absence of the migrant, a silence that may derive from discomfort or fear or inadequacy, and that quite often becomes a space of aphasia. Ironically, Ebe performs well when she meets

Corrado‟s many acquaintances because finding topics for conversation is “un‟abitudine che s‟acquista in America, dove la gente s‟incontra ai cocktail-parties e si parla di tutto e

55 di nulla” (“a habit that you develop in America, where people get together at cocktail parties and talk of everything and nothing”; 177).

If a friendly language can “recast the reassuring quality of the home soundscape in the new environment” (Bal “Lost in Space” 33), Ebe‟s example demonstrates that sharing a common mother tongue does not guarantee engagement with the original community. Memory is the missing link between Ebe and the old familiar faces. In her absence, they have built an archive of common memories around the tragedies of war, persecution, starvation, and so on, from which she is excluded. Through their oral stories, the old friends are willing to make that archive available to Ebe because she knows the people and the places involved. For the same reason, they have no interest in entering her own memories, linked to names and locations they cannot recognize. Nor can they understand her sense of guilt for leaving behind her dearest persons14 or the complexity of her ties with Italy. As a result, their choral narration overcomes her solitary voice. The strength of the community, that landscape that is protective as long as the tree is still rooted there, increases the vulnerability of the returning subject, so that Ebe lies in a position of double marginality: she is a refugee turned into a migrant in the United States and a tourist in Italy.15 To make her mother and brother happy, the narrator is led to put on a mask and pretend enjoyment, as she admits, and in so doing her act of speech is trivialized, bound to play by the rules of society. That mask is clearly reminiscent of the screen-like rag that covers most of Sgombero‟s face and brings us back to the paradox of mobility as imprisonment.

In the light of the intrinsic risk of being silenced signaled by the writer, how can

Ebe‟s fragile voice reach out to the readers of the XXI century? And how can Il Tempo

56 dei Dioscuri help us explore the current social world? I do not envision Ebe‟s story as an uncritical, nostalgic return to a community and its landscape, to borrow Corrado‟s analogy. Rather, I believe that by drawing our attention on that difficult encounter, the author warns us against the weaknesses of being suspended on the threshold or of identifying with a landscape. On the one hand, the migrant risks being silenced by its own community of origin if this fails to listen to and welcome in its archives the memories of those who leave. This holds true for any migrant, but is especially important for those groups of people who have been the object of racial discrimination first and oblivion later, like the Italian Jews. Ebe Cagli faced a different kind of displacement from that of the many fellow Italians of the Little Italies, but this can only make us appreciate more the legacy of her writings. On the other hand, the connection between individual and territory is not necessarily as solid as Corrado pictures it. Ebe and her family live in

Rome, in the capital of the Fascist regime, and yet they can not see that the racial laws are coming and sweeping their lives away. As a plea, she claims that her parents were not interested in politics. In the novel, a slight shame shows through for that lack of vision, but the plot is all centered on the human outcome of that inaction. In other words, we are only indirectly alerted about the dangers of political disengagement in a society that behind the rhetoric of tolerance cultivates racial hatred.

More direct is instead the appeal to consider the lived experience of the migrant in

Il Tempo. This concern permeates Ebe‟s autobiographical narrative at large, as I have tried to stress, but there is a specific episode that I find effective in the perspective of the migratory as we know it today. On their last night together in Rome, Corrado and Ebe are joined for dinner by Nino, a successful Sicilian tailor and raconteur. A lapse on Nino‟s

57 part elicits a conversation on his origins. He tells that although he would like to marry, there are eleven siblings to set up before him. Being “lu granne,” the oldest brother of a large family, he has had to take on the responsibilities of an adult early on in his life.

uno dei primi ricordi che ho è che me ne stavo, in vesticciola, legato con una corda a una sedia spagliata, con l‟ultimo nato in braccio…. Cosa crede, in una famiglia di pescatori mi facevano il completino? Mamma mi ricavava „na vesticciola da un suo vecchio abito…. Quando era l‟ora di mangiare mia madre distribuiva pane e cacio. Se il cacio era scarso, a me dava solo due fette di pan nero; io dovevo capire che non c‟era di più. E se lagnavo … lei tagliava „na terza fetta di pane più fina: “la metti in mezzo”, mi diceva, “e fai finta di mangiare pane e cacio.” (TD 179-80)

one of the first memories that I have is that I was, in a modest gown, tied with a rope to a strawless chair, and holding the last born…. What do you think, that in a family of fishermen they could afford a new oufit? My mother would make a simple gown from one of her old dresses…. When it was time to eat, my mother would hand out bread and a chunk of cheese. If the cheese was scarce, I would only get two slices of dark bread; I was supposed to understand that there was no more. And if I complained … she would cut a third thinner slice of bread: “Put it in between” she would say “and pretend you are eating bread and cheese.

Later on, Nino tells another story while enjoying his scampi dish. This time, the protagonist is “la forestiera di Villa Fonte Aretusa,” a foreign and strange lady that owns a magnificent villa in a Sicilian town and has a passion for fabrics. One day, she invites

Nino over to her villa to announce the wedding of Assuntina and Nunzio, two local people, and to commission him to an elegant suit for the broom. The lady first takes Nino into a room where on a table lies a doll in a white wedding gown. And then, since porta male (“it brings bad luck”) if the broom sees the bride in her wedding gown, she takes him into a second room.

Mi faccio sulla soglia e cosa vedo? Tante bambole vestite coi costumi nostri: una replica in miniatura dei paesani che si radunano in piazzetta, prima di cena. Ecco perché comprava tante stoffe dalla Rosalia. Le bambole chissà da dove se le è fatte venire: sono una via di mezzo tra bambole e manichini. (182)

I step onto the threshold and what do I see? Lots of dolls dressed in our traditional clothing: a miniature replica of the locals that get together in the small town square before dinner. That is why she bought so much fabric at Rosalia‟s. Who knows where she has the dolls sent from: they are in-between dolls and mannequins.

In the novel, the author devotes six full pages to Nino‟s stories with the purpose of highlighting the opposite reactions of the siblings. Nino‟s mother‟s gesture is poetic, symbolic, beautiful, for Corrado, and he thinks that Nino‟s vesticciola could be the source of his talent as a tailor. On the contrary, Ebe sees poverty in that patched small gown and in that chair, and a sad game unable to deceive anyone in the gesture of the mother.

Likewise, after listening to the second story, Corrado exclaims: “Che storia straordinaria![…] questa vecchia che si trasforma in demiurga, crea tutto un suo piccolo popolo, stabilisce nozze e nascite…” (“What an extraordinary story! […] this old lady that turns into a demiurge, creates a whole miniature people of her own, setting up weddings and births….”; 182). On the other hand, Ebe‟s compassion brings her to look at the human tragedy of that mad lonely woman, “sradicata chissà perchè in mezzo a gente tanto diversa da lei, tagliata fuori dalla vita a fare i suoi monologhi con le bambole”

(“uprooted, who knows why, among people so different from her, cut outside of life to do her monologues with her dolls”; 183-4). Although Ebe absolutely disagrees with

Corrado‟s remarks, she remains silent, which confirms once again how her voice heavily relies on the written word.

The two stories that Nino recounts are very different but share one element: the migrant subject. Nino is the protagonist of a fortunate migration within Italy, while the lady is an immigrant, probably an aristocrat fallen on bad times. Nino‟s audience is also made up of a return migrant, Corrado, and an emigrant, Ebe. In this picture of the migratory and of its interconnections is reflected the composite world of migrations that characterizes the past and present history of Italy. Although the scene has no direct correlation to today‟s mobility, the author of Il Tempo, also through the examples of Nino and the old lady, points to one approach to life and art that foregrounds the human experience of the uprooted subject. This human exploration, the responsibility to uncover and keep alive the memory of past migrations, the effort to understand the lived existence of the migrant, be it an immigrant or emigrant, can be read as the ethical counterpart of the migratory aesthetics of the novel.

Therefore, mobility and imprisonment define the paradoxical position of the subject on the threshold as depicted in Lo Sgombero, a representation of human spatiality that the author ultimately uses to construct her own space of representation, that is the novel itself. The notion of suspension unfolds across a plurality of disciplines in the book, from history and geography to visual art and literature, to converge on the human experience of displacement. I will now proceed to investigate this topic by placing Il

Tempo within the larger frame of Ciclo dell’esilio obbligato.

1.3 FAMILY, NATION, AND GEOGRAPHIES OF SUSPENSION IN IL TEMPO DEI DIOSCURI AND LE

SABBIE DEL SILENZIO

Ebbi la fortuna di essere forse il primo lettore di questo prezioso libro di Ebe Seidenberg, prezioso per la testimonianza che potrebbe apparire tutta privata, ma che presto coinvolge un‟intera generazione, e per la schiettezza di una lingua che riporta la memoria dei fatti come una realtà ancora tutta viva. (TD 5, emphasis in the original)

I had the good fortune of being perhaps the first reader of this precious novel by Ebe Seidenberg; precious for the testimony that could appear totally private, but that soon involves an entire generation, and for the frankness of a language that registers the memory of facts as a reality still fully alive.

With these words Giuliano Manacorda starts the introduction of Il Tempo dei Dioscuri, a book that for the critic testifies to the “dramma generale” (“general tragedy”; 6) of the racial laws. Testimonial writing and racial laws are certainly inextricably connected in

Seidenberg‟s production. However, it must be noted that what Manacorda terms

“dramma generale” does not actually coincide with national tragedy, as those laws hit a specific portion of the overall Italian population. Moreover, as the Jewish minority was geographically, politically and socioeconomically differentiated within itself, the subjective experience of a Jew or a single Jewish family cannot be arguably representative of an “entire generation” of Italian Jews. In this sense, both Il Tempo dei

Dioscuri and Le sabbie del silenzio position themselves next and in dialogue with other testimonial works centered on Italian Jewry in the XX century, such as Giorgio Bassani‟s

Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1962), Natalia Ginzburg‟s Lessico famigliare (1963), Elsa

Morante‟s La Storia (1974), and Alexander Stille‟s Benevolence and Betrayal (1991).

Seidenberg‟s novels complicate those narratives by introducing an external perspective,

61 stemming from the same historical circumstances portrayed in those works, but matured outside of Italy. Furthermore, by testifying to the estrangement and struggles of the refugee in the host country, Ciclo dell’esilio obbligato raises issues that are also dealt with by displaced people for whom Italy has become the new home.16 In so doing, it opens up areas of contact between canonical and emerging literature, Italy and foreign- born authors, the national and the transnational.

Published in 1975, Le sabbie del silenzio (SS) is the first book of Ciclo, and anticipates a number of thematic and stylistic elements of Il Tempo and Ciclo at large: family and nation, isolation of the exile in the host country, sense of fracture masked behind a “normal” life, suspension, memory, simple language, and so on. Among these, familial and national ties occupy a privileged space in the first two novels of Ciclo. In Le sabbie, Anna, the narrator, returns to Rome from America to see her mother, Elvira, on her deathbed. And so does Paola, Anna‟s older sister who, on the other side of the

Atlantic, has settled with Igor, her Eastern European husband, after rejecting Italy, “Paese maledetto …[che] chiude tutte le porte a uno straniero” (“A cursed country … [that] closes all the doors to a foreigner”; 38), and distancing herself from her parents: “Loro non capiscono niente, sono borghesi, pieni d‟egoismo, di idee fatte, di pregiudizi. In certi momenti li odio…” (“They don‟t understand anything, they are bourgeois, full of selfishness, fixed ideas, and biases. At times, I hate them…”; 39). Paola‟s relationship with her native country is antithetical to Corrado‟s: her repudiation of Italy and her Italian origins counters his decision to permanently return to Rome. Besides, her deliberate adherence to the American lifestyle seems to belie his anthropological view of landscape, by which transplantation is always an act of violence on the individual. This notion,

62 which appears for the first time in Le sabbie, is endorsed by Anna, a refugee herself, who thus explains her failed marriage and attempt to reconstruct an existence in the United

States: “Ho voluto provare. Ma vedi, un mio amico pittore a Roma mi disse: „… non so se uno possa ricominciare … è come prendere, che so io, una figura di Raffaello e metterla in un paesaggio fiammingo‟” (“I wanted to try. But see, a painter friend of mine told me in Rome: „… I don‟t know if you can start all over … it‟s like if you took, say, a figure of Raphael and placed it in a Dutch landscape”; 199). Anna‟s vision is ideally close to that of the female narrator of Il Tempo: despite the darkness of the Fascist regime, she does not renounce her Italian past and believes that people pay a high price17 for social and cultural adjustment even when that change is sought, as is for Paola.

Paola leaves Italy long before the racial laws, and by the time Anna reaches her in the new country, she feels full-fledged American and happy to have buried her memories of a poor and corrupt Italy. She may have very good reasons for pledging loyalty to the nation that has offered her and her family prosperity. Nonetheless, Anna distrusts the mask that her sister bears: “Quel riserbo anglosassone che lei tanto ammirava, cui voleva costringersi, era l‟opposto del suo temperamento mediterraneo” (“That Anglo-Saxon reserve that she praised so much and wanted to force upon herself was the opposite of her

Mediterranean temperament”; 74). That change has occurred in Paola‟s habits is a datum, but Anna‟s comment makes us see it as a self-imposed act of repression motivated by the desire to conform to cultural schemes other than one‟s own. Therefore, either successful or not in its outcome, transplantation is regarded as a coercive process in both novels.

The use of the word “maschera” (“mask”) in this context must also be noted because, throughout the cycle, the narrator often resorts to the theatrical figure of the mask to

63 signal social attitudes and behavioral patterns that do not correspond to the real desires, needs, or temperament of a character. And this, as I will show later, may lead to tragic consequences.

Although political involvement is not a major topic in Seidenberg‟s works, it accounts for Anna‟s and Paola‟s different approaches to their Italian past. Influenced by her mother‟s opinion that politics is “[r]oba sporca. Non bisogna occuparsene” (“dirty stuff. You need not deal with it”; 16), Anna, like Ebe in Il Tempo, never feels attracted to it, either as a child or an adolescent, while, instead, she develops a passion for literature.

On the contrary, Paola‟s interest in politics is decisive for her life choices. At the university, she first befriends a group of Eastern European students passionate about the cause of Zionism, and then meets Igor, a brilliant student, but a foreigner, poor, and openly anti-fascist, and thus a social outcast. Igor‟s struggles are only hinted at in the novel, as the family past is reconstructed through the memories of Anna who was a child when Paola was engaged to Igor. We know however that as soon as he wins a scholarship in the United States, the couple leaves Italy, arousing resentment in Paola‟s parents

“contro lo straniero che gli aveva portato via la figlia” (“against the foreigner who had taken their daughter away”; 39).

Paola‟s father is the only other person in the family to be interested in politics, but his ambiguity is striking in this regard: in a pocket he carries a small portrait of

Mussolini, and in the other, one of Stalin. “Non si sa mai, così non corro il rischio di sbagliarmi, no?” (“You never know, in this way I will not run the risk of being wrong, right?”; 21). In the same fashion, to avoid risks in the afterlife, he always carries an image of the Star of David and one of Jesus in his pockets. The father opts for a day-to-

64 day survival in a society that shows signs of instability, and calls on tradition to continue nurturing his sense of national belonging: “Ma io sto bene nel paese mio, come ci sono stati bene i nostri nonni, i nostri bisnonni e quelli prima di loro” (“But I‟m fine in my country, as were our grandfathers, great-grandfathers and those before them”; 34).

This familial blend of political indulgence, passivity, unconcern, and ambiguity confirms the immobility of the bourgeois Italian Jewish family under Fascism that is also underscored in Il Tempo. Indeed, Paola‟s sensibility to politics derives from the outside, from people external to the family circle and to the nation. Furthermore, like in the other novel, emphasis is placed on the effects of the racial laws on the family members, in terms of physical dispersal and reconfiguration or silencing (as the title suggests) of their relations. While the father dies in an accident long before their approval, his wife and children escape persecution in different places: Anna reaches Paola in America; Elvira hides from the Nazis in the small town of Raggio with her sister Mimì; and her son,

Carlo, removed from his role of captain of the “Regia Nave Dante Alighieri,” flees to

Tripoli with his wife Naomi.

Raggio, Tripoli, and the United States draw a map of the family diaspora even more scattered than the one we can infer from the epistolary exchange between Ebe and

Corrado in Il Tempo. Also in this novel, letters and poems are forms of private communication that acquire a testimonial function. Elvira, the only member of the family to remain on Italian soil, collects the letters and documents that her children send her from abroad between 1938 and 1945. By the few fragments that Anna reads and comments, we can imagine a geography of suspension that stretches from the transatlantic cities and the Italian peninsula to Libya. Libya, which D‟Annunzio called

65 the “fourth shore of Italy,” became a colony in 1911 and was annexed into the Italian state in 1939. By 1940, when Carlo flees to Africa, Tripoli is the prototype of the Italian colonial city, as Mia Fuller has argued.18 On the one hand, the textual reference to

Tripoli, although cursory, is of interest because it represents this city as a place of refuge from Italy rather than a symbol of Fascist Italy‟s expansion and urban colonialism. On the other hand, Carlo‟s employment at his father-in-law‟s “ditta salvata sotto falso nome e affidata ad amici „ariani‟” (“firm saved under a false name and entrusted to „Aryan‟ friends”; 93) may suggest an ambiguous relation between suspension (as removal and expulsion of the Jews from public roles) and private involvement in the national project of colonization at a time of declared racism. In any case, the appearance of Tripoli in the novel twists together and complicates the ties between the story of the narrator‟s family and the history of centripetal movements that concern Italy.

In the context of Le sabbie del silenzio, Carlo‟s letter from Libya (quoted in the novel) aims at reassuring his mother about his conditions. In spite of this, Anna captures in his tone a resigned, acquiescent, almost passive attitude, which seems to characterize

Carlo after his later return to Rome: too old to be a captain, he accepts an office job (at the ministry) and plays bridge to “fill up” his life. For Anna, her brother‟s apathy is the sign of the invisible mutilation, a deep wound, that the racial laws have produced on

Carlo and, possibly, on many others alike. Anna herself feels that fracture, and the strategies she uses to convey it reveal remarkable similarities with the aesthetics of suspension expressed in Lo Sgombero. First of all, the narrators of Le sabbie and Il

Tempo share an analogous profile: they are both females who safely grow up in Fascist

Rome protected by family and society; love art and literature and are indifferent to

66 politics; spend their summers in Versilia; and there experience separation from Italian society for the first time, when they both read the same pink poster that announces the expulsion of Jews from public schools. On the diegetic level, the two stories diverge after the arrival of Ebe and Anna in the United States: both continue their studies of literature in Baltimore, but whereas Ebe builds a solid conjugal relationship with Daniel, Anna‟s rushed wedding with Bernie soon fails.

As a refugee and enemy alien, Anna cannot secure funding for her studies, therefore her visa is likely to be denied, a situation that is reminiscent of the legal pressures and sense of precariousness that migrants generally have to face in the host countries. Bernie, an American student, comes to her help by proposing to marry her, a quick solution to her immigration problem and a chance for Anna to claim American citizenship after a few years. This moment never comes, however, because although grateful to Bernie, Anna divorces him when she realizes that their cultural differences are overwhelming. She is not the “balabuste” (Yiddish for “good homemaker”) that Bernie would like to have next to him, a perfect mistress of the house and protective mother, a prototype of the American Jewish woman embodied by June and present in some of

Seidenberg‟s works. Although I will go more into detail on this category of woman later in the next section, it is worth noting here how the narrator explains her disassociation from the young generation of Jewish Americans that she encounters in the host country:

“non erano entrati nella realtà di quello che accadeva in Europa: c‟era tutto un oceano di mezzo e c‟era anche il desiderio naturale di difendere la propria fede nella vita” (“the had not entered the reality of what was occurring in Europe: there was a whole ocean in between and there was also the natural desire to protect one‟s faith in life”; 194). Bernie

67 is one of them. He has never left the American soil, and his optimism inevitably clashes with Anna‟s negativity and sense of isolation which sometimes pushes her to „talk‟ to shop mannequins rather than real people.

M‟aveva aiutata. Cosa pretendevo da lui? Che entrasse nel mio esilio? Dovevo imparare a essere come gli altri, a perdermi in questa folla di coppie giovani…. Ma in me c‟era una rottura. Ero come uno zoppo che s‟affanna a camminare pari passo con i sani, e la rottura duole…” (177, emphasis mine)

He had helped me. What was I expecting from him? That he would join me in exile? I had to learn to be like the others, lose myself in this crowd of young couples…. But in me there was a fracture. I was like a lame person who strives to keep pace with the healthy, and the fracture hurts…

While in Il Tempo Ebe comes to see herself as a “hybrid” product of two worlds and strives to negotiate between them, in this earlier novel, suspension signifies an irreconcilable fracture, an incurable scar. The simile of the lame used to visualize Anna‟s

“rottura” stresses the connection between inner space and physical movement through outer space, a link that is strengthened by Anna‟s memory of her Atlantic passage.

“Gibilterra, l‟ultimo punto d‟Europa. Là era cominciata la frattura e me la portavo dentro, non sapevo in che modo sanarla. Era come se fossi deforme, con la testa in avanti e i piedi volti all’indietro” (“Gibraltar, the last point of Europe. The fracture had begun there, and I was carrying it inside me, I didn‟t know how to heal it. It was as if I were deformed, with the head forwards and the feet backwards”; 186, emphasis added).

Clearly, this image has Sgombero as its intertextual referent, while adding a geographical component to the artistic representation of liminality. As a matter of fact, in the book, the memory of Gibraltar, threshold of Europe, is triggered by Anna‟s trip to another liminal

68 location, the U.S.-Mexican border, where she obtains a permanent visa. The roller shutters of the local shops, a basilica, a fountain, the green benches, and two women dressed in mourning conjure up familiar pictures for Anna, a Mediterranean and even

Roman atmosphere totally alien to the U.S. environment. This “sensazione di noto, di già visto” (“perception of the known, of the already seen”; 180), a sort of reversed estrangement, is the result of a deceptive game that Anna engages with the aid of the surrounding elements. She indulges in it to fulfill her desire of proximity to Italy, now that she is about to make a further step away from that land by becoming a permanent resident of the United States. Every time she follows these Mediterranean simulacra close by, Anna realizes her mistake, and expresses her disappointment by the same rhetorical question that she uses about Bernie. For instance, hearing the women dressed in mourning that could have been “due popolane di Trastevere” (“two lower-class women from Trastevere”) speak Spanish, she wonders: “Ma cosa m‟ero aspettata di sentire?”

(“But what had I expected to hear?”; 181), and so on for the basilica (“Cosa m‟ero aspettata di trovare? Statue di marmo, affreschi?” “What had I expected to find? Marble statues, frescoes?”; 183), etcetera. In other words, everything in this border town is a

“parvenza,” an illusory bridge to an absent third country, Italy, except for an unfamiliar exotic tree whose flowers (synesthetically described “d‟un rosso squillante” “of a brazen red”; 185), elicit the memory of Gibilterra. Ironically, that “Judah‟s tree” is the only reliable element in the picture, resistant to any fantasy of Italianization, and so powerful to evoke the locus of Anna‟s fracture.

National politics, family diaspora, and the geography of suspension here outlined, have a point of convergence in the figure of the mother in Le sabbie. Her role of

69 mediation moves into two distinct directions. First, by collecting and keeping together her children‟s letters, she reunites the family members in one place, even if only imaginarily.

And second, through her childhood stories and her poem on the mother-daughter relationship penned in Raggio (and quoted in the novel), Elvira represents a link with the past and the long-lost Jewish family tradition. Her mother, “nonna Bettina,” was “la massaia solerte della Bibbia” (“the mindful housewife of the Bible”; 54), a woman that

Anna envisions strong and sure of her social role.19 And her father, “nonno Davide,” was the last observant Jew in the family. Neither Anna nor any of the narrators in Ciclo have a solid sense of Jewish identity, but reaching out to those ancestors constitutes a first attempt towards a dialogue with the non-Italian Jews, a group that, as I am going to show, became an important part of Ebe Cagli‟s life in the new country as much as a significant literary subject.

1.4 FROM IL TEMPO AND LE SABBIE TO COME OSPITI: EVA ED ALTRI. FRAMING

TRANSNATIONAL CONNECTIONS THROUGH WRITING

Ebe Cagli Seidenberg‟s Ciclo dell’esilio obbligato has a peculiar feature: it contains a multitude of displaced individuals, few Italians (usually family members or acquaintances of the narrator from the Roman years), and only a handful of Italian

Americans. And this despite the fact that most of her narratives are set in the United

States, a main destination of Italy‟s migrations.20 The marginal presence of Italians can be mostly understood in the light of the personal vicissitudes of the author. In America, her social relationships abruptly steered towards that ethnic side of the family that she

70 had never seriously engaged with in Italy, the Jewish side. Her status of refugee during the first years in the U.S. was crucial to this reorientation, which she later maintained through marriage and the social connections that she and her husband, as a couple, established in California. The Berkeley Hills, out of where she set forth her literary journey, serve as a natural and symbolic frame for the transnational relationships that

Seidenberg investigated.

By “transnational” I do not mean here the “fluid and multiple identities” that transmigrants can create in a globalized economy, “grounded both in their society of origin and the host societies” (Glick Schiller, Basch, and Szanton Blanc 11). In fact, most of the subjects in the cycle do not have ready access to their place of origin nor are they at home in the new society. Either fleeing from material poverty or, most likely, from racial persecution, they are “bodily pushed over borders by forces beyond [their] control,” according to the phenomenology of displacement that Darko Suvin describes in

“Displaced Persons” (107), also drawing from Said‟s essay “Reflections on Exile.”21

Seidenberg captures this phenomenology in its unfolding from her own perspective of displacement. She represents through art the connections (and disconnections) among people crossing each other‟s lives in the American society, each carrying on their own stories, languages, and cultures. In this context, transnational thus refers to the nature of these ties that occur, in a national space, among displaced persons. Outlining such links throughout the cycle is one purpose of this section. In addition, I will adopt the transnational to expound the author‟s approach to the writing process and demonstrate that for her “the only home truly available … is in writing,” as Edward Said concludes

(“Reflections” 184), following the Jewish philosopher and exile Adorno.22 Multiple

71 literary and cultural traditions flow into Ciclo and ally to produce a transnational discourse on exile an displacement. I will concentrate on Come ospiti, the role of the narrator, and the use of language and literary sources to show how that discourse is framed for an Italian readership.

In Le sabbie del silenzio and Il Tempo dei Dioscuri, while the narrator weaves the web of her family ties, we are also given a cross-section of the American world that she inhabits, that is, students‟ life in Baltimore at the end of the 1930s and beginning of the

1940s. In those years, the city counted a high number of Jewish immigrants, among whom many refugees coming from central Europe.23 Characters like Kucher, Daniel, the

Kriegers, Bernie, and June that we encounter in the novels, convey the net of Jewish- oriented relationships that Anna and Ebe establish once their protective Italian families are out of reach. They connect with the Jews in multiple ways and to different degrees. In general, it is easier for the narrator to identify and coalesce with European Jews, such as

Professor Kucher, because they share the “deformity” of the refugee, but also the richness of the European cultural tradition. Indeed, this aspect is central in Gente sul Pacifico where Gunther Anerbach, an Austrian refugee and professor of German literature, develops a real friendship with the narrator, the German widow of Raffaele, an Italian

Jewish professor of literature. In the comparison between European and American life, the main motif of this novel, the narrator takes side with Anerbach by sharing his critique of America, seen as “un paese giovane per cui bisogna essere giovani e duri…” (“a young country for which you need to be young and tough”; 58-9), and where people feel obligated to be so. Indeed, the displaced narrator cannot build a real friendship with

Dorothy, Anerbach‟s wife, a proud American from New England that embodies the

72 youthful energy of the Unites States. In the book, the Viennese origins of Anerbach are compared to the Venetian roots of Raffaele: growing up immersed in the catholic atmosphere of their central European cities, both lack a strong sense of Jewish identity.

They position themselves at the opposite edge of the Eastern European Jews who carry with them “un senso tanto sviluppato, invece, di quella che alcuni chiamavano identità etnica, altri tradizione religiosa, o patrimonio culturale, o destino sociale e storico” (“such a deep sense, instead, of what some called ethnic identity, others a religious tradition, or cultural heritage, or social and historical destiny”; 80). Raffaele‟s sacred book is the

Divine Comedy rather than the Bible, which makes apparent that his (and his wife‟s) interaction with other Jews, or what Turner terms “communitas,” is based on intellectual affinity.

With respect to the confrontation between America and Europe, the sub- distinction between Jews coming from Central (or Western) and Eastern Europe is secondary. Yet, Ebe Cagli Seidenberg (who married the son of Russian immigrants) explores in depth this relationship in her works. While she often puts in relief the warm hospitality of the Russian Jews, she also shows how biased that reception could be. For instance, in Le sabbie, the Kriegers (the family that hosts Anna during her studies in

Baltimore) never completely accept their Italian guest as one of them: they speak

Yiddish, are orthodox Jews and passionate Zionists, and have a privileged tie with the

Israeli students. Anna, instead, has never been interested in politics or participated in a

Seder, the traditional rite performed on the first night of Passover. In her memories, the exit of the Jews from Egypt has always gone together with the Easter egg. Her fragile

Jewish identity is, therefore, at the same time a shield and a self-exclusionary weapon for

Anna: the Kriegers welcome her into their house because she is a refugee while deeming her an imperfect Jew, if not a “schickse,” a Christian, as Mrs. Krieger derogatorily calls her. In these representations, the author thus emphasizes the difficulty of forging solid horizontal alliances among marginalized subjects, or what Françoise Lionnet and Shu- mei Shih term “minor transnationalism,” as I suggested in the introduction.

Religion plays a major role in dictating and regulating alliances and distances within the Jewish network; nevertheless, there are other aspects to take into consideration. In the short novel “Kaddish per Fania,” comprised in Quando i santi marceranno: tre storie d’America, the connection between the narrator and Fania is complicated by kinship, social and gender issues. Fania has immigrated at sixteen from a poor Russian village, and within ten years thrives in America thanks to her ambitious character and tenacious work in the garment industry. She raises four children with her husband Yakov, but there is no harmony in the family. “Blut,” that is relation by blood, is a key word for Fania. On the one hand, she refuses to recognize her son‟s children as grandchildren because their mother is Polish American, and as such, “[h]a il sangue dei genitori: e in tutti i polacchi cattolici c‟è l‟istinto dei pogroms” (“has the blood of her parents, and like all Catholic Poles, has the instinct of pogroms”; 150), she states. On the other hand, for the fear of dying without descendants, an event that would nullify all her efforts and success, she puts pressure on her only daughter, Debbie, whose only scope of life is to marry a wealthy Jew and procreate. Fania strenuously supports this project and the social role of woman as wife and mother; in her eyes, this is the right pay off for her own huge sacrifices in family and society. On the contrary, Fania is resentful toward her

Italian Jewish daughter-in-law (whom she acknowledges as kinship) for choosing education over family, and denying to help her realize her objective.

Beyond seeming disagreement or bad blood, however, this relationship is more complex than it appears. Fania is a domineering figure, a matriarch generous and vindictive, whom the daughter-in-law, i.e. the narrator,24 associates with her Italian mother. Although as a matter of fact she fails to build an alliance with Fania, while rewinding her life story, the reader can sense the underlying connection between these two displaced women. An overwhelming gap separates instead the narrator from Debbie.

In spite of the young age (she is only eighteen), this is branded as a bad example of first generation American, concerned with filling the void left by the moral and religious values of the “old country” by dint of material comforts.

The influence of social milieu on the definition of transnational alliances is perhaps best portrayed in the last novel of the cycle, Come ospiti: Eva ed altri (CO). In this work, the German word “gemutlich” is used to define the warm and congenial atmosphere of Sam and Becky‟s house in Berkeley: a lit fireplace, a cozy family room, a profusion of plants and flowers, the pleasant smell of fresh-baked cakes, coupled with the hosts‟ hospitality, help create a sense of home. In addition, a mezuzah affixed to the door frame and a menorah are signs of the Jewish ethnic identity that Sam and Becky have inherited from their immigrant parents and continue to pass down to their children. That is not all. In fact, their house is more than a private nest for the family and few friends. It hosts dinners and cocktail parties that Becky regularly organizes, as they are instrumental

(“un mezzo essenziale” 24) to her husband‟s advancement in the ranks of the math department at the local prestigious university, the University of California at Berkeley.

This picture reveals the peculiar social environment that the novel represents, and the formulation of the role that women are expected to play within it. Becky incarnates the matriarch type already underlined elsewhere, ambitious and self confident at home as well as outside, a protective mother and faithful wife. Lastly, the location of the couple‟s house is not less telling of the imbrications of family and social life. As many other professors‟, Sam‟s household lies in the “quartiere „della gente bene‟ a nord del Campus”

(“upper-class neighborhood, North of Campus”; 11), in the Berkeley Hills, a gorgeous corner with a spectacular view of the San Francisco Bay. In this locus amenus, introduced as an earthly paradise, “Eva and the others,” as the title recites, that is other displaced individuals like her, make their entrance (and sometimes, exit) as guests, unable to forge an authentic “gemutlich” atmosphere for themselves and around them.

In the following pages, I will argue that through the interconnection of social, geographic, and literary space the author has produced a piece of transnational writing with an Italian accent. In Come ospiti, the narrator, another alter ego of the writer, resembles that of Il Tempo, and even though it is difficult (and outside the scope of my work) to draw a line between autobiography and fiction in this novel, it is certainly true that Ebe Cagli Seidenberg had an extended first-hand knowledge of the social reality that she portrays in this book. Like Becky, Gerda, Eva, and Ying, the narrator is a deracinated woman married to a math professor and involved in lots of social activities, but her openness to the others‟ confidences is not matched by an equal proneness to talk about herself. Indeed, her move to California has brought her to the realization that “era la vita a impormi il mio destino, che non potevo scegliere nulla, né il luogo in cui volevo vivere, né la gente con cui volevo stare, neppure la lingua in cui avrei voluto esprimermi” (“life

76 would decide my destiny, that I could not choose anything, neither the place where I wanted to live, nor the people that I wanted to have around, or the language in which I would have liked to express myself”; 123, on the linguistic aspect I will return later). As a result of this inner fracture, the narrator closes herself in a “silenzio obbligato” (a “forced silence” echoing the “esilio obbligato” of the cycle‟s title) that underlies “l‟apparenza di una vita normale” (“the appearance of a normal life”).

From this peculiar position of liminality, the author investigates a multiplicity of experiences endured by other uprooted persons, the means they employ to forge a sense of normalcy, and to what extent they succeed. The narrator‟s condition of forceful displacement attracts to her men and women with traumatic pasts behind: for example, the French visiting professor Pierre, a perfect outsider, entrusts his experience in a concentration camp only to her; and Sig, a refugee from Berlin and colleague of the narrator‟s husband, Daniel, tells her of his years in South Africa or in the U.S. army.

However, it is especially the confidences of women such as Becky, Gerda and her close friend Eva that allow the narrator to dig in the social mechanisms of the microcosm whereof she is part.

The German refugees Gerda and Eva, the Italian narrator, and the Chinese Ying are all women that strive to put roots in the new environment. In order to fashion a sense of normalcy, besides a house in the Berkeley Hills, they need to build positive family and social ties that may help them overcome the negative weight of their past. Sometimes, this requires transcending national and ethnic affiliations. For instance, a banal conversation in Italian and some comments about the remarkable changes of Fascism on

Italian men‟s appearance (“sembravano tutti più belli, atletici e sportivi…. Mussolini …

77 aveva capito quanto giovassero lo sport e la ginnastica” “they looked more handsome, athletic and sporty…. Mussolini … had understood the value of sport and gymnastic”;

14) convince the narrator to keep away from the Italian section of the Ladies‟ Faculty

Club of the University of California at Berkeley. Gerda, on the other hand, is not as connected to the exuberant fellow national Eva as she is to Ying, whose self-disciplined nature, in turn, intimidates the “Mediterranean” narrator. The barrier between Gerda and

Eva has also to do with class origins. In comparison to Gerda and her husband Sig, Eva

Stein comes from a lower-class German Jewish family, which strikingly contrasts with her new role of wife of a younger and ambitious “wasp,” the mathematician Robin

Davies.25 Furthermore, another element of distinction concerns the approach to motherhood and parenting. Both Gerda and Eva envision in their daughters a second chance to live their own childhood and adolescence, which have been stolen from them due to racial persecutions and loss of parental figures. While Gerda manages to keep a family together, even if through lies, Eva‟s story turns instead into tragedy. She is overprotective towards her daughter Dawn, supposedly a symbol of the beginning of a new life for her mother, as the name suggests. When Robin divorces her to marry his

American secretary, Eva is left in a condition of extreme marginalization, pushed out of the physical and social boundaries of the Berkeley Hills, and brought to commit a horrific act. “Quante volte un essere umano può ricominciare?” (“How many times can a human being start anew?”; CO 188) she writes before taking her own and Dawn‟s lives.

Ultimately, Eva is unanimously condemned as a criminal and purposely forgotten by the local community that quickly resumes its customary social life.

The reverberations of Eva‟s tragic story in the text are multiple and help clarify the authorial viewpoint on three overlapping terrains: society, ethics, and aesthetics. First, both the American society at large and the microstructure of the Hills are put under scrutiny through Eva. When her status shifts from professor‟s spouse to unemployed divorcee, she loses, among other things, her health insurance, which makes her feel being treated like a “pariah.” “Che paese duro è questo, sotto l‟apparenza tanto munifica, per i divorziati, i disoccupati, i vecchi, insomma per tutti quelli che stanno al margine. E l‟efficenza [sic] burocratica con cui ti tolgono i privilegi!” (“What a harsh country, under the munificent appearance, for those who are divorced, unemployed, the elderly, in brief, for all those who live at the margins. And how efficient the bureaucracy is when it comes to taking away your privileges”; 164). An analogous practice of marginalization regulates social relations in the small academic community nested in the Berkeley Hills. The creeping fakeness that underlies munificent appearance is best exemplified by cocktail parties, dinners, open houses, and other social activities constantly depicted as mise en scènes or masquerades, to use one of the author‟s favorite themes, la maschera. At these events, everyone, whether desiring it or not, puts on a mask and “si costruisce un personaggio,” (“builds a character”) minding to keep conversations as impersonal as possible. With subtle irony, the narrator so explains the origin of her own feeling of emptiness:

Ero sempre stata socievole e la gente m‟interessava. Ma alle cene, sempre almeno per otto, era difficile fare una conversazione. Si tenevano a tavola discorsi su argomenti innocui: il tempo, cosa fioriva in giardino, quanta fatica innaffiarlo…. Le donne scambiavano qualche ricetta, chiedevano notizie dei bambini; anche i cani e i gatti erano molto importanti…. “No shop talk at the table!” Era un parlare

che diventava una fuga dal parlare: ecco perché non eravamo mai meno di otto…. Avevo concluso: c‟incontriamo per non incontrarci. Se questo era il modus vivendi dovevo accettarlo, dato che non amo impormi. Ma ero una mite ribelle: l‟accettavo a modo mio, cioè parlando poco. Chissà quante persone avranno pensato di me: è gentile, ma con lei non si sa di cosa parlare: non ha figli, neppure un cane o un gatto. Non sa nemmeno giocare a bridge. (CO 12-13)

I had always been sociable and interested in people. But at dinner parties, always for eight at least, it was difficult to hold a conversation. Innocuous topics were brought up at the table: the weather, what was blooming in the garden, how much hard work to water it…. The women would exchange some recipes, would ask about the children; even the dogs and cats were very important…. “No shop talk at the table!” It was a talk that turned into an escape from talking: that is why we were never less than eight…. I had concluded: we meet not to meet. If this was the modus vivendi I had to accept it, given that I do not like to assert myself. But I was a quiet rebel: I accepted it my way, which is, by not speaking much. Who knows how many people must have thought of me: she is nice, but with her there is not much to talk about: she has no children, not even a dog or a cat. She cannot even play bridge.

The concern for appearances, the bella figura tipically considered a staple of Italian social relations, as Paci‟s novel Italian Shoes will illustrate in the next chapter, fades away only when serious problems threaten the fragile balance of people like Gerda and

Eva. At these moments of crisis, masks come off, temporary alliances are forged, and private confidences take place off stage, so to speak. As Caren Kaplan reminds us in discussing cultural autobiography as an “out-law” genre, coalition politics are undertaken out of necessity, as a means to stay alive, both personally and culturally (“Resisting” 130-

2), something that holds a special relevance, I believe, in the case of Ebe Cagli

Seidenberg‟s unconventional life story. The narrator listens and cautiously judges, but she mostly witnesses, from a powerless position, to the production of a social scene dominated by mechanisms of individualistic interest. Eventually, let alone her compassion to Eva and others, both personal normalcy for the displaced subjects and

80 career advancement for ambitious academicians are constructed through practices of marginalization and exclusion of the most vulnerable subjects.

Furthermore, in Come ospiti, social masking is also reflected in the local landscape. If the artificiality of modern houses is recorded as a disturbing element in the first pages, by the end of the novel the background of the Hills loses its “parvenza d‟un paradiso terrestre o quella placida d‟un limbo” (“appearance of earthly paradise or a placid limbo”; 11). It takes a sinister look, amplified by the thick fog that wraps the area as in a mortal grip, and by the grasping horns that reach out from the bay, like human moans. “Non hai visto quanto mi sono sforzata prima di capire finalmente che non si può?” (“Didn‟t you see how hard I tried before I eventually realized that it is not possible?”; 208) Eva‟s shadow scoffs at the narrator, who still finds protection from the fog/death through her husband, in a house that is nothing but “una falsa isola di pace” (“a false island of peace”). The narrator‟s last words, “[a]ncora cerco di vivere come se… come se” (“I still try to live as if… as if”), leave the novel suspended like her attempt to fashion a sense of normalcy. Nonetheless, the development of the entire narrative suggests that for a displaced person to put roots elsewhere, even in the most pleasant locality, is a materially unattainable goal, a utopia.

The ethical and esthetical issues are directly related to this struggle for an ordinary existence. In Come ospiti, aesthetics embraces ethics, an ethics of solitude, as

Paolo Valesio observes in an article on the writer between worlds (1981), to which I will return at the end of this chapter. Paradoxically, the one that bears the name of the archetypal mother in the novel, Eva, gives life to Dawn to later on take it back along with hers. In other words, she cannot protect either herself or her daughter from death. The

81 fundamental question that this work poses about motherhood is: how can a woman possibly grant protection to her offspring when that feeling of safety has been denied to her? On this topic, the narrator holds a distinct position from the other women: “Avevo il diritto di dar vita a una creatura che forse non avrei potuto aiutare? ... quell‟essere ancora non nato, avevo voluto proteggerlo prima di concepirlo” (“Did I have the right to give birth to a creature that I might have not been able to help? ... that being not yet born. I wanted to protect it before conceiving it”; 17). As clearly emerged already in Le sabbie, protection is inconceivable for the refugee, so the narrator bases her decision not to have children on the fear that history may repeat itself, as an act of personal responsibility.

Notably, the narrator‟s speculations on motherhood and the refugee condition spring from a book that she borrows from a local library: We Came as Children: A Collective

Autobiography (1966), edited by Karen Gershon, one of the ten thousand Jewish children who arrived as refugees in Britain before World War II. In the volume, Gershon gathered two hundred and thirty-four contributions of former child refugees and four poems of her own. The narrator of Come ospiti establishes an intimate dialogue with this choral text, and shares with the voices that rise from it “il senso d‟una ferita che non si rimargina”

(“the sense of a wound that cannot heal”; 16). At the same time, she finds fault with its lack of a complete subject behind the multiplicity of scattered voices.

The prominence of We Came as Children in Come ospiti sheds light on some crucial aspects of Ebe Cagli Seidenberg‟s literary operation, which in my view points to a transnational model. On the one hand, the narrator‟s commentary clarifies the type of literary project that the author accomplishes in the last novel of Ciclo, and the cycle at large, read as an intertext or terragraphica, the writer‟s textualized place or “country”

82 from which she positions herself, to use Cixous‟s words.26 A literary project, that is, with a testimonial value, like Gershon‟s, but that employs the autobiographical novel rather than the ethnographic report as an alternative “out-law” genre (Kaplan, “Resisting”).

Time urged Gershon “to collect what material [she] could before it was too late” (1966, introduction) whereas personal and social negotiations were Seidenberg‟s main preoccupation. Therefore, she explored the “situatedness” (i.e., the multifaceted shifting practical relationships developing in a specific context)27 of a group of liminal individuals through the situated knowledge and imagination of one of them, the homo-diegetic narrator. The conversation with Gershon is kept alive through Eva‟s character, a friend of the narrator but also one of the ten thousand children who were transported to England.

By creatively retracing her life story, the author added to the voices recorded by Gershon that of those who did not survive.

Furthermore, this written exchange with a non-Italian text, also visible in the transition/translation between English and Italian, complements the oral “confidences” that are such an integral part of the plot, and helps shape the autobiographical narrative space into a transnational arena. Said‟s idea that the new home is to be found in writing, an assumption that I endorse with respect to Seidenberg, brings me to carefully consider how the negotiation of languages and texts is carried out from a suspended position. Exile and home are always concepts in dialogue, and if for the exiled writer “language becomes the country” (Cixous xx), I argue that Seidenberg could only be chez soi in a displaced

Italian language. Or, that she fashioned a sense of home by rooting her writing in the official language of Italy, and by making that code shift and drift towards the unfamiliar

83 sounds and symbols to which she was exposed during her own geographical peregrinations.

The passage quoted above (“non potevo scegliere nulla, né il luogo…, né la gente…, neppure la lingua in cui avrei voluto esprimermi”) suggests that for this author the choice of writing in Italian outside of Italy is a declaration of belonging, and an act of resistance to the constraints of the new environment. I will recall, however, that precisely in that new frame of the Berkeley Hills and surrounding areas she started to take writing classes with an American master, Wallace Stegner, and to practice the art of writing.

Thus, I will contend that her long extraterritorial parenthesis was instrumental to turn a previously passive sense of national belonging into a critical return journey to her native language and country. To put it differently, while her character of “mite ribelle” elicited a taciturn attitude in social life, it reflected in her modus scribendi through a prolific and facund writing practice that displaces a monolingual territorial Italian culture by bridging it to foreign models in order to produce a transnational and “homebound” literary paradigm. By using “homebound” to refer to Seidenberg‟s production, I wish to signal the tension between its aspiration to travel homeward, back to Italy and the Italian readership, and its actual confinement or cultural marginalization on both sides of the

Atlantic. It is yet another figuration of the mobility/imprisonment paradox evoked by

Mieke Bal and embodied by Sgombero.

In the second section of this chapter, I underlined the influence of Bontempelli on

Seidenberg‟s stylistic goal of “povertà conquistata,” which inspires not only Il Tempo dei

Dioscuri but Ciclo as a whole. As I will also emphasize with respect to Paci‟s writing in the next chapter, that style is deliberately subdued because it is to direct our attention

84 outside of the single word, and specifically, to the testimonial function of the entire text/cycle. To effectively convey the forced mobility of the displaced individual or group, writing must follow that movement closely. This is the meaning of the author‟s tactical moves (in de Certeau‟s sense, xix) among a substantial variety of sources and languages that allow her to make her argument. In general, shift in focus from the Italian narrator‟s family nucleus to transnational marginal lives corresponds to a stronger circulation of non-Italian sources (sometimes textually positioned side by side with the Italian), and to an excavation, linguistic and cultural, of objects that the author acknowledges as

„foreigner‟ to the Italian readership. A few examples will help illustrate this point.

Corrado‟s personal letters and the materials from The Caisson, in Il Tempo, are the most valued evidence of his exile and war experience. While they are presented in their original form (e.g, the handwritten letters by Corrado in English), their translation into Italian makes them accessible to the Italian reader. Moreover, to voice the strife of a diverse community of displaced people, in Come ospiti, the narrator‟s account relies on the authority of a transnational pool that includes, besides Gershon‟s book, the journals of

Corrado Alvaro (Quasi una vita), Mansfield, Kafka, and Gide. The title of the novel comes from a line by Jewish writer Paul Celan, comprised in the bilingual epigraph (“Il mondo da riprodurre balbettando / nel quale io come ospite / avrò soggiornato…”), but the cover and the numerous works by Corrado Cagli reproduced within the volume can be still reconnected, intertextually, to those present in Il Tempo. An American nursery rhyme (“The farmer is in the dell”) prompts Italian childhood memories of “O quante belle figlie, Madama Dorè.” A Christmas carol coexists with the Hebrew song that accompanies the celebration of a Bar Mitzvah; few lines from the Divine Comedy

85 introduce the story of a Florentine Jewish cousin of the narrator, and Gozzano‟s poetry on death is used to speak of the fog/death in the Berkeley Hills. Two lines of a song by

Belafonte on “weak foundations” become a comment on the fragile relationship between

Robin and Eva, and the latter‟s painting artwork (reflecting her wounded identity) is itself a text in dialogue with the others. In spite of the variety of these sources, Seidenberg‟s writing is well orchestrated, disciplined, and planned in detail: it reaches across national, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries in order to articulate the discomfort of suspension and displacement.

As I suggested before, the Berkeley Hills constitute a paramount place for the lived experience and artistic activity of Ebe Cagli Seidenberg. After exploring the transnational links visible in her works, I will conclude by reconnecting her to Italy through the intangible presence of a canonical writer, Giovanni Boccaccio. In particular, I hypothesize that Seidenberg‟s reading of the cornice of the Decameron may be regarded as a subtext of the representational “frame” of the Berkeley Hills in Come ospiti.

Seidenberg begins her doctoral dissertation (“Dualità stilistica e ideale nel Decameron”

1943), identifying three key mo(ve)ments in the cornice – individual experience, overcoming of the individual, and contemplative return (9) – defined according to the relationship that the members of the “onesta compagnia” establish with the surrounding reality. At first, the plague sweeps away everything, so that the individual is overwhelmed by the general, the crowd is indistinct, and no landscape can be discerned, until a group of young women, led by Pampinea, reacts to this deadly atmosphere.

Pampinea utters “il primo commento dell‟individuo singolo alla sciagura comune,” (the first comment of the single individual to the common tragedy”), which marks the

86 transition from an unspecified subject to a distinct human being, with a proper name and story, and placed “in uno sfondo preciso, quello della sua casa” (“against a precise background, that of her/is house”). By exhorting her friends, likewise frightened, to join forces to escape death, Pampinea also initiates the second mo(ve)ment of the cornice, that driven by a collective effort, a politics of survival by coalition. So far, the ravages and dread of the Black Death may figuratively be associated with the devastations and terror caused by Nazi-Fascism in Europe. Both phenomena push out of a certain territory a crowd of people, although the refugees of Come ospiti do not plan their escape as a group, but rather meet each other in a “safe” place. The language used to describe the refuge chosen by Pampinea evokes that later employed to represent the Berkeley Hills:

è più che una campagna ridente, è un‟affermazione di tutto quello che è loro negato nella città colpita dal flagello, è bellezza, gioia, salute; ed è ancor di più: è il luogo ove ogni affanno materiale sarà abbandonato … è il paradiso terrestre ove le creature che hanno schivato e vinto la morte riposeranno in olimpica letizia: „Quivi s‟odono gli uccelletti cantare, veggionvisi verdeggiare i colli e le pianure…‟ (emphasis added, 5)

it is more than a bonny countryside, it is an assertion of everything that is denied to them in the scourged city, it is beauty, joy, and health, and even more: it is the place where every material concern will be abandoned … it is an earthly paradise where the creatures that have avoided and defeated death will rest in Olympic delight: „Here we shall hear the chant of birds, and see verdant hills and plains…‟

By the time Ebe Cagli wrote these comments, she had not yet moved to California, and in her mind, the scourged city could well be Fascist Rome rather than Boccaccio‟s Florence.

More important than the similarities between landscapes (Berkeley and Tuscan hills) or cityscapes (Florence and Rome) is however the repositioning of the survivals, their new perspective on here, where they live safely, and there, the city left behind. We thus turn to

87 the third defining mo(ve)ment in the cornice: the “contemplative return” to the abandoned city through an elusive gaze. According to Seidenberg, the “onesta compagnia” closes itself in a rigid “grazia schematica” (“schematic grace”) that resembles that of the landscape, and in so doing, dehumanizes itself, loses memory of the other world, and looks at it from faraway. In this context, the practice of “novellare” that the survivors undertake has a merely esthetic purpose (“porgere diletto”), disconnected from their emotional life. As a result, they give up the role that they played in their plagued city, although a “passive” one being destined to die, and become “spectators” of the world that animates their novellas: “sfilano dinanzi a loro personae tragiche e personae comiche; essi a volte risponderanno con cenni di pietà, a volte con aperte risa, ma da lungi, dal loro luogo di contemplazione” (“tragic and comic personae parade before them; at times, they will respond with signs of compassion, at times with laughs, but from a distance, from their place of contemplation”; 9, emphasis in the original).

Isolation and dehumanization, desire to throw the past behind, emotional detachment, and insubstantial novellare/conversare are, remarkably, the same components of the representational frame of the Berkeley Hills. Those “spettatori” are reminiscent of the “ospiti” portrayed by Seidenberg. And that “pietà” or “compassione” that opens the Decameron (“Umana cosa è aver compassione degli afflitti,” “It is human to have compassion on the afflicted”) is a constant concern of the author. Yet, with

Boccaccio‟s artwork, as with Corrado‟s, she appropriates to re-elaborate, combine, and produce something new and original. Liminality thus becomes an “experimental region of culture” as Turned envisions it (“Liminal” 60-1). In Come ospiti a certain atmosphere is

88 re-enacted to be questioned, and even subverted, by the narrator‟s intervention that demonstrates the risks of a “contemplative return.”

By proposing a connection between Ebe Cagli Seidenberg and Boccaccio, after taking her on a transnational journey, I have hopefully conveyed the complicated nostos of this writer and reached two goals: take her back “home,” by instating her name into a literary tradition that was part of her own background; and, bring “home” to her, by calling forth a critical discussion within Italian and Italian American Studies on the significant but often little known issues that she raises in her works.

In a 1989 paper on the “Writer between Two Worlds,” Paolo Valesio states that the image that “seems to best represent the work of a writer at the point of his highest commitment is that of a threshold” (268). The act of moving back and forth (or transgressing) across languages, cultures, mentalities, is not only a quality of the “true writer” in his view, but it averts the threat of a “folkloristic literary diplomacy, in which every writer becomes a mouthpiece confined within a group too distinctly defined” (268).

Ebe Cagli Seidenberg is a sui generis author in this sense, since she does not technically belong to the body of expatriates writing in Italian in the U.S. to which Valesio inscribes himself. To be sure, she shares with them many aspects, such as: relative isolation; lack of immediate horizontal ties with Italians and consequent concentration on the “vertical dimension” of Italian literary tradition; community-based (rather than nationally- oriented) work; and production of a writing nourished by distance (i.e., mediated) and silence. In addition, as a refugee, her choice to represent “the micropolitics of the quotidian” in Italian may be seen as a means to preserve her dignity as Italian, to

89 paraphrase Valesio, through an “intensely linguistic vindication” that according to him has not occurred on the part of the anti-fascist exiles (270).

About twenty years ago, Valesio auspicated a conversation among three literary communities, i.e., the Italian, the American, and the Italian American. In embracing that project, which still today constitutes a challenge, my work tries, in fact, to reinforce its vision by including other voices of the diaspora, such as those of the Italian Canadian community and of biracial subjects, as the next chapters will show. The Italian Jew writing in Italian outside of Italy was not contemplated in that framework, nor did it include the new interlocutors that have emerged from the recent migrations to Italy.

I believe that Ebe Cagli Seidenberg‟s personal and literary journey has much to contribute to that discourse. From her peculiar position of suspension, she imagined a transversal exchange meant not to experimentally harmonize languages and cultures per se, but to provoke a critical self-reflection on the complex identity of the Italian nation, of its members‟ affiliations, and its migratory movements. Ciclo dell’esilio obbligato truly demonstrates that, for her, home is to be found only in writing, that is by exercising a language that flows with the subject across territories, like one of the objects that

Sgombero holds together, but a resilient one, responsive to the new environment and yet able to talk back to the community of provenance. We can approach the cycle with an eye to the past and Fascist Italy, or interject it in a larger consideration of contemporary displacements and cultural representations. We can localize it as a product of the Italian culture of the American West Coast, or read it within a global network of texts on refugees, interethnic relations, testimonial writing, etc. The aspects of Ebe Cagli

Seidenberg‟s exile and artistic production that deserve critical attention are manifold and the encounter with this author is just beginning.

Notes

1. According to Renzo De Felice, by October 28, 1941, 5966 Italian Jews had left the country. See Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo, Part 2, chapters 6 and 7. For a general introduction to Fascism, see De Grazia and Luzzatto, Dizionario del Fascismo; Schnapp, Sears, and Stampino, A Primer of Italian Fascism (this also contains “The Manifesto of Race,” chap. 13). Besides De Felice, on the topic of Italian Jewry under Fascism and the racial laws, see Sarfatti, Gli ebrei nell’Italia fascista. Vicende, identità, persecuzione; Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei: le leggi razziali in Italia; Stille, Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism. On the Italian/European diasporas of the 1930s and on antifascist emigration, see Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants: The Intellectual Migration from Europe 1930-41; Garosci, Storia dei fuorusciti 192-3; on Fascism and emigration, see Cannistraro and Rosoli, “Fascist Emigration Policy in the 1920s: An Interpretive Framework,” International Migration Review. It should be noted from the outset and kept in mind throughout this chapter that historically the post-racial laws Jewish exodus did not overlap with mass emigration from Italy, since Fascist restrictions and economic protectionism made outbound flows drop drastically in the 1930s (for data see Gianfausto Rosoli, quoted in Donna R. Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas, 2000, 134, Table 6.1). While the distinction between the two phenomena remains generally valid within my analysis, I will seek ways of connecting them, by exploring, for example, the perception of the refugee (turned into a foreign citizen) as a “tourist” in the community of origin and her/is aphasia or inability to voice ideas and concerns after returning to it.

2. Remembering the violence of certain anti-Semite articles that had appeared in the Italian newspapers before the racial laws, Rita Levi-Montalcini writes: “For the first time I felt pride in being Jewish and not Israelite, as we had customarily been called … I felt a bond with those who were, like me, the victims of the lurid campaign unleashed by the Fascist press.” In Praise of Imperfection: My Life and Work, trans. Luigi Attardi, 80. Of her arrival in St. Louis, in 1947, she says: “Along with fascism there survived a streak of anti-Semitism which had found fertile ground in the descendants of immigrants from Italy.…In my rare visits to the famous shops on the hill, I avoided any reference to politics and especially to fascism.” Ibid. 136.

3. The history of the Cagli family is extremely intriguing and deserves a space of its own, which transcends the limits and goals of this project. For a first glimpse at this family, I have relied on Carol Parikh‟s The Unreal Life of Oscar Zariski (2008), a biography of mathematician Zariski who studied in Rome during Mussolini‟s rise to power, married Ebe‟s sister, Yole, and was Abraham Seidenberg‟s advisor at John‟s Hopkins University. I am particularly grateful to James Stimpert, University Archivist at Johns Hopkins University for kindly making available to me Ebe‟s doctoral dissertation, and to Carla Zingarelli-Rosenlicht and Cynthia De Nardi for sharing their memories of Ebe and providing me with a better understanding of her personality and life-story.

4. Before the Cock Crows, whose first chapter had previously appeared in Stanford Short Stories 1956, (Wallace Stegner and Richard Showcroft eds.) was later published in Italian as

L’incantatore di serpenti. It is a coming-of-age novel told in the first person by Ada, a girl who after World War II leaves her wet nurse and the small village of Raggio (later mentioned in Le sabbie) to join her widowed mother and older siblings, Fabio and Regina, in the city. Ada is an outsider, but when a charming sensuous stranger, Alex, intrudes into the lives of Fabio and Regina, she interferes in this atmosphere of dark passions. On this novel, its relation to Seidenberg‟s later works, and the existential and psychological dimension of exile in her narrative, see Roberto Salsano, “Esilio coatto e solitudine esistenziale nella narrativa di Ebe Cagli Seidemberg” (sic), Campi immaginabili, 26/27, I-II (2002): 154-64. Before the Cock Crows received a number of favorable reviews by the American press. “It is with sustained mood and visual effectiveness that this story is told…. [Miss Postani is] a thoughtful and imaginative new author” wrote Joanne Bourne for New York Times (“Three Lives and One,” 24 November 1957). On Washington Post and Times Herald (13 October 1957), we read: “[a]n impressive first novel,” written in a style that is “simple, lyrical and beautifully plastic.” Curiously, in the review, this “timeless” story of “passion and tragedy” is contrastively compared to Calvino‟s The Path to the Nest of Spiders, which “tells a pitiful anecdote of Italy under Nazi domination.” Reviews of Before the Cock Crows also appeared on Herald Tribune (Carol Field, “Dark Passions,” 17 November 1957), Publishers’ Weekly, The Columbus Enquirer, The Journal of Milwakee, and led to the appointment of Seidenberg as a Member of The Authors Guild and The Authors League of America. Beside Before the Cock Crows and Ciclo dell’esilio obbligato, E. C. Seidenberg also published the autobiographical novel Casa in vendita (2001) and Visite d’inverno. Racconti di vari paesi (2001). On this volume, see Roberto Salsano, “Dimora ed esilio nella scrittura narrativa di Ebe Cagli Seidemberg” (sic), Studi medievali e moderni, 2 (2002): 317-33. She contributed two entries (“G. Ungaretti” and “A. Moravia”) to the Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature (1947), and a review of Mona Simpson‟s Anywhere but Here to Uomini e libri (1987). This periodical awarded her the national prize “Insula Romana” for Quando i santi marceranno (1983), a collection of three short novels set in America. Like “Treni per Cambridge” and “Kaddish per Fania,” “Quando i santi marceranno” deals with displaced people, but it does so by incorporating race as a form of marginalization internal to the American society. Its main character, Irving, is an African American worker who helps a young Italian Jewish refugee fix her new house in California.

5. All English translations from Ebe Cagli Seidenberg‟s works are mine.

6. According to Corrado, another artist would have liked Lo Sgombero. Di Genova suggests that the indirect reference is to De Chirico, whose composite figures and metaphysical painting also appear in Un altro sgombero of 1944 (Cagli Seidenberg, TD 161). Di Genova, Giorgio. Cagli. La collezione Ebe Cagli Seidenberg 32. Interestingly, Giorgio De Chirico and his brother Alberto Savinio were close enough to be nicknamed “I Dioscuri.” See also Maurizio Fagiolo dell‟Arco et al., The Dioscuri: Giorgio De Chirico and Alberto Savinio in Paris, 1924- 1931. For the sake of clarity, I will refer to Corrado‟s drawing as Sgombero (rather than Lo Sgombero) every time I want to stress the human side of that hybrid “mannequin-man,” as the artist‟s own wording (“Poveraccio, …”) also suggests.

7. It is noteworthy that for most of that year (February through October), the 600,000 Italian resident “aliens” of the U.S. were classified as “enemy aliens” and subject to a number of restrictions. They had to comply with curfews, carry photo-identity cards at all times, give up firearms, radios, cameras, maps, etc. For the fear of Japanese invasion, law enforcement was particularly strict on the West Coast, where Corrado was receiving training under the American flag. There, about 10,000 Italians were ordered out of coastal and other strategic areas (many were fishing families that lost home and livelihood) and some 250 were sent to internment camps.

See Lawrence Di Stasi, ed., Una storia segreta: The Secret History of Italian American Evacuation and Internment during World War II. The intricacies of national identity in the war context have been investigated by Camilla Calamandrei in Prisoners in Paradise (2000). This documentary on the Italian POWs in America (over 51, 000, mostly captured in North Africa) and their interaction with the local Italian American communities, highlights, among other things, the relative freedom the POWs enjoyed within the camps in California and the warm reception given to them by the local Italian American families.

8. In English in the original. The letters exchanged between Ebe and Corrado during the War were originally written in English and translated into Italian by the author to integrate them in the novel. A bilingual version of six of them is provided at the end of the book.

9. In another letter sent from a German camp for displaced persons in 1945, Corrado wrote: “It is definitely wrong to force a figure by Caravaggio into a Liebermann‟s landscape” (TD 224). Cagli conceived landscape in physical, visual and cultural terms. He defined America “una grande divoratrice di uomini” due to its “ambiente che non lega,” pretentiousness, and superficialità. See Marco Valsecchi, “Visita a Corrado Cagli,” Tempo (Milano, 11 luglio 1967), qtd. in Crispolti, I percorsi di Cagli 302. On the human perception of “landscape” and its theorizations, see Hirsch and O‟Hanlon, The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space (1995); Flint and Morphy, Culture, Landscape, and the Environment (2000); Eugenio Turri, Antropologia del paesaggio (2008 [1974]); Farinelli, Geografia: Un’introduzione ai modelli del mondo (2003, 38-73).

10. Bal has also explored Turner‟s concept of ritual in the context of textual semiotics and feminist studies in the essay “Experiencing Murder: Ritualistic Interpretation of Ancient Texts,” in Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism 3-20.

11. Bontempelli‟s notion of “povertà conquistata” is contained in his commemorative speech delivered in 1937 in memoriam of Luigi Pirandello: “Ha voluto morire nudo. Maschere nude ha intitolato il corpus del suo teatro. La vita nuda una delle raccolte di novelle. Questo che lui chiama nudità è la raggiunta semplicità. È di tutti gli spiriti grandi questa smania di levarsi d‟attorno il superfluo, il decorativo, l‟inutile …. S‟intende che parlo di povertà conquistata. Nudità e povertà come punto non di partenza, ma di arrivo. E arrivo dico, non ritorno. La povertà- nudità cui si giunge per una diritta sorveglianza di sé, non è quella da cui possiamo essere partiti nascendo: essa, quando è ben raggiunta, è fatta densa di tutte le prove accumulate lungo la vita attenta”. Introduzioni e discorsi (1964, 31). “He wanted to die naked. Maschere nude [Naked Masks] he entitled his theatrical corpus. La vita nuda one of his collections of novellas. What he calls nakedness is the attained simplicity. It belongs to all great wits this thirst for getting rid of the superfluous, the embellishing, the worthless …. It is understood that I am talking about poverty obtained. Nakedness and poverty not as a starting point, but as a point of arrival. And I say arrival, not return. The poverty-nakedness attained through honest self-discipline is not that from which we may have started at birth: this, when correctly attained, is packed full of all the trials gathered during an attentive life” (my translation).

12. For an overview of the principles of “magic realism,” see Massimo Bontempelli, Realismo magico e altri scritti sull’arte, Elena Pontiggia, ed. (2006).

13. The comment is reported on the back cover of Before the Cock Crows, 1957.

14. For instance, a mixed feeling of pain, shame, and guilt seizes Ebe when she learns from her mother that they lost many relatives under the Nazi occupation (TD 163).

15. In spite of the others‟ perception of her, Ebe feels like a “sister” to the “Mediterranean people” that walk in streets of Rome, and a “daughter” to Italy: “Avrei continuato a venire finchè avessi potuto. Perchè ero sempre venuta a ritrovare non una, ma due madri. E se una era mortale l‟altra sarebbe stata sempre viva: l‟altra che m‟aveva respinta e ora sembrava pronta a riaccogliermi, volubile e pigra, orgogliosa e prodiga.” “I would have kept on returning as long as I could. Because I had always come to find not one but two mothers. And if one was mortal, the other would always be alive: the one that had rejected me and now seemed ready to welcome me back, volatile and idle, proud and prodigal” (193, my translation).

16. For instance, Edith Bruck (born 1932, Hungary), a survivor of the concentration camps who moved to Rome in the 1950s, has extensively explored in her books topics that are also central to Ciclo, such as: the mother-daughter relationship (Lettera alla madre, 1988); loss, survival and self-identity; aspiration to normalcy (L’attrice, 1994); the Jewish migrant; the relationship with the native and the host country, religion and language. Contrary to Seidenberg, she has chosen to write in her adoptive language, Italian. She considers herself a transnational writer and, in a 2005 interview by Maria Cristina Mauceri, stated: “Unfortunately I am not regarded as an Italian writer. I think that I will remain a foreigner all my life.” See “Edith Bruck, a translingual writer who found home in Italy: an interview,” trans. of “A colloquio con Edith Bruck.”

17. The epigraph of the opening volume of Ciclo eloquently starts with a poem by W. Blake: “What is the price of Experience? do men / buy it for a song / Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, / it is bought with the price / Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, / his children…”

18. In chapter 7 of Moderns Abroad: Architecture, Cities and Italian Imperialism, Fuller describes Tripoli as a “colonial” city (as opposed to an imperial city) for its contradictory combination of adaptation of the colonizer to the local built environment and simultaneous perception of the city as European. See chapter 2 for an analysis of the physical and rhetorical constructions of the Italian colonies in Africa. In the 1930s, the Fascist government also sponsored settlements of Italian farmers (“demographic colonization”) in rural areas as a remedy to overpopulation and poverty in Italy.

19. Seidenberg published her first novel with the pseudonym of Bettina Postani, which might suggest an intentional recovery of her family female lineage through writing.

20. An exception is the Brooklyn-born Sara Provenza, the seamstress protagonist of the short story “Home in America,” in Visite d’inverno. Racconti di vari paesi (2001, 139-55). It is about the conflict of feeling American and being the daughter of a Sicilian immigrant that returns to the old country.

21. Suvin‟s categories (exiles, refugees, expatriates, émigrés) are differentiated according to typology of departure (single/mass and reasons) and return (possible/impossible). They are in part derived from Said and cogently applied to the figure of the border intellectual that mediates between O (original society) and S (the new, “strange” one).

22. In his meditations on Adorno‟s autobiography Minima Moralia, Said also highlights that writing is a fragile and provisional home. The text is “uninhabitable” as the writer, or at least the intellectually committed writer that Said has in mind, does not allow him/herself “the sleep of self-satisfaction.” He/she never ceases to explore the world we live in with a “worldliness,” courageous, attitude, and to rewrite it. On these concepts, see “Between Worlds,” in Reflections 554-68. For another perspective on the text as “habitable, like a rented apartment,” see Michel de Certeau,The Practice of Everyday Life xxi.

23. See, for instance, Dante Della Terza, Da Vienna a Baltimora: la diaspora degli intellettuali europei negli Stati Uniti d’America (2001).

24. An autobiographical clue is given here by the middle name of the narrator, Speranza, which is also Ebe Cagli‟s own middle name.

25. It is interesting to notice Eva‟s remark about her name: “[Becky e Sam] pensano che abbia sposato Robin perché voglio cancellare le mie origini assumendo il suo cognome, che voglio „passare‟ come si dice qui per quei negri di sangue misto che, potendo sembrare bianchi, fanno finta di esserlo” (“[Becky and Sam] think that I married Robin because I want to erase my origins by taking on his last name, that I want to „pass‟ as they say here for those negroes of mixed blood who, being able to look white, pretend to be so”; 129). Eva brings up name changing and “passing,” which are two practices that have been also common within the Italian American/Canadian communities to overcome racial discrimination and gain social recognition.

26. In dealing with Duras‟s Indochinese works, Cixous argues that in order to understand the author‟s identity as an artist, her texts should be read not in isolation, but as an intertext. This is a textualized place, not a real one, but one that the woman writer, separated from her land of birth, creates on the basis of memory and imagination and from which she writes. An intertext is the writer‟s “country,” her terragraphica. See Cixous and Jenson, “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays.

27. On the notion of “situatedness” and its theoretical development, see Donna J. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature; and Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis, “Standpoint Theory, Situated Knowledge and the Situated Imagination.” Feminist Theory 3(3): 315-333. The latter emphasizes the imaginary side (in relation to the cognitive side) of the process of mental negotiation between individual and social experience. Like knowledge, also imagination is “situated.” It is affected by the “positioning of our gaze” but also gives specific meanings to our experiences and concepts.

CHAPTER 2

Stubborn Relics: Re-tracing the Soil of Identity in Frank G. Paci’s Black Madonna

and Italian Shoes

Ethnicity changes according to the power relations that play out at a specific historical moment and in a given place. As Sollors points out, it is an invention, a modern cultural fabrication, “not a thing but a process” (xv), and as such, it is also “reinvented and reinterpreted in each generation by each individual” (Fischer 195). The exacerbation of ethnic identification leads to rigid demarcations of boundaries, implementation of practices of exclusion, and downright racism, that is, a virulent form of ethnocentrism. In the first chapter, I interpreted suspension, historically devised against the Italian Jews in the 1930s, as an aesthetic practice adopted by a refugee to reconfigure national identity from the place of her exile, California. I will now investigate the connection with the

Italian nation by turning to Black Madonna (1982) and Italian Shoes (2002), two literary representations of a more ordinary1 migratory experience in the history of modern Italy, that is emigration resulting from material deprivation and social exploitation vis-à-vis racial persecution. I will also further explore the notion of liminality including the condition of cultural suspension of the migrants‟ children, as it emerges from Frank G.

Paci‟s novels.

In Black Madonna, Paci deals with post-World War II Italian migration to

Canada, the construction of Italian identity in a peripheral town of Ontario, Sault Ste

Marie, and its re-interpretation in the transition from first to second-generation migrants.

Assunta and Amedeo Barone, the fictional parents in the novel, come from rural areas of

Italy, like most migrants who left their central and southern agro-towns after the foundation of the Italian Republic in 1948. In fact, Italy emerged from the ruins of the war as a country with an immense reservoir of labor power (favored by high birth rates and the stop of emigration flows under Fascism) that became a major resource for the reconstruction of post-war Europe and for the overseas labor markets. In major cities such as Toronto and Montreal, and in middle-sized urban centers, railroad, mining and steel towns, the newcomers revived familial and communitarian values that the seasonal migrants of the first (and much smaller) wave of immigration had introduced into Canada in the early XX century.2 While the reproduction of old everyday practices and associational life strengthened feelings of Italian regional and national identity among the migrants, it also made more problematic the identity of their Canadian-born and/or raised children.

In Black Madonna, Joey and Marie represent this new generation that needs to deal with the “relics” of the migrant parents‟ world in order to shape its own future. I will contend that Paci re-traces the post-migrant ethnic space in his best-known novel through his peculiar treatment of relics and the interplay of death and life that arises from them. I will further analyze the concept of relic in Italian Shoes, another fictional text that investigates places, religious and social practices, but this time within the geographical context of Italy, where the novel is set. For Mark Trecroci, the protagonist and first-

97 person narrator in the latter novel, who visits his native land in the 1970s, relics are sources of both fascination and contact with his ethnic roots. Since he is also an aspiring writer seeking an authentic voice, his spatial practices and positioning become central within a critical reflection on ethnic identity and writing. As the word “re-tracing” in the subtitle of this chapter suggests, Paci‟s pieces of fiction will be read in their capacity to connect migrant and post-migrant generations by means of “preserving” (Paci‟s own term) memories of the past (family, work, and religious practices) while refashioning

Italian identity from a geographically and linguistically deterritorialized position. In this perspective, Paci‟s ethical goal of “serving ordinary hard-working migrants” through writing will be discussed in relation to the question of voicing silenced subjects that I started to address in the first chapter.

2.1 “TO THEM THE SAULT … WAS L’AMERICA”: ITALIAN RELICS IN CANADA

Black Madonna (BM) is the second of a dozen novels published by Frank Paci since The

Italians, a bestseller in 1978-79 and one of the foundational texts of Italian Canadian literature.3 Like The Italians, Black Madonna portrays the Italian migratory experience in

Canada in a realistic style but it has mostly drawn popular and critical attention for its feminist ideas and its powerful construction of ethnic female characters.4 Although Ebe

Cagli also largely dealt with family relationships (e.g., sister-brother, and mother- daughter), Paci‟s novel moves into the orbit of a local Italian community, which, I suggested, is a peripheral subject in Ciclo dell’esilio obbligato.

Black Madonna is about family and place. Before the second World War, Adamo

Barone, the father, moves from a village in the Abruzzi region to the small industrial town of Sault Sainte Marie, in Northern Ontario, where the presence of an Italian colony had already been recorded since the 1910s (Moroni). He starts working for the local steel plant and, after the war, Assunta joins him as a mail-order bride from Novilara, a village in the adjacent province of Pesaro, in the Marche region. In the West End, the Italian section of Sault Ste Marie, Adamo and Assunta own a house, participate in the social life of the community, and raise their two children, Joey and Marie. Opening the novel,

Adamo‟s death sets the tone of the narrative: the event accelerates the decline of an old way of affirming ethnicity, which Assunta still embodies, and the emergence of a new ethnic conscience in his children. The West End is the other protagonist of the novel: its decay runs parallel to the crisis that invests the life of the Barones‟ and of the Italian local community at large. Movement and stasis, life and death, decay and renewal alternate and overlap in Black Madonna to reveal the process of re-invention of ethnic identity from the perspective of the migrant‟s children that Paci himself represents, being born in

Pesaro in 1948 and having emigrated to Sault Sainte Marie in 1952 with his parents.

To shed light on the intricate and intimate relationship between death, life, and

Italianness that dominates Paci‟s novel, it may be useful to examine it through the notions of place and space that Michel de Certeau adopts in his exploration of daily practices and spatial stories in The Practice of Everyday Life (117-18). As I observed in the introduction, de Certeau identifies “place” (lieu) with a “configuration of positions,” a distribution of elements in a “proper” and distinct location, whereas “space” (espace) is a

“practiced place” because it occurs as the effect of operations deployed within it. In brief,

99 the former implies stability, while the latter assumes movement. With respect to enunciation - writes de Certeau - “space is like the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualization,” and modified according to the changing contexts. Streets and texts are examples of places that can be transformed into actualized spaces by acts of, respectively, walking and reading. De Certeau consequently maintains that within stories place is “a determination through objects that are ultimately reducible to the being-there of something dead” (e.g., pebbles, cadavers and tombs); and that space is, instead, “a determination through operations which … specify „spaces‟ by the actions of historical subjects” (118). Stories do not simply provide an oppositional view of place and space, but they also “organize the play of changing relationships” between them, by constantly “awakening inert objects” and “putting to death” mobile elements in numberless forms.

In Black Madonna, the textual “labor” of transforming places into spaces, and conversely, spaces into places, is carried out, I argue, through the semantic ambivalence of relics. I will call a relic what survives the passage of time, either at a specific location or across spatial movement, and is invested with a sense of devotion. My argument is that

Paci‟s writing is distinctively devotional insofar as it preserves the memory of migrants by disseminating the text with different kinds of traces (e.g., human, behavioral, linguistic) that can be identified as relics. However, I will also claim that this writing registers a fundamentally ambivalent attitude towards memory, since the children‟s quest for emancipation forcefully voiced by the author challenges the very act of preservation.

This tension is at the core of Black Madonna, where Italian migrants, practices, and places are represented as being-there, outdated, dead, or doomed to disappear, and yet

100 demanding and deserving recognition and affection. In Paci‟s novel, the most direct association of relics with “something dead” is established immediately, in the first of the thirteen sections that compose the text. This opens with an Italian-style funeral consisting of a mourning scene, inside the Barones‟ house, and the funeral cortège outside that follows the Mass in the West End. The dead body is Adamo‟s: his corpse lies “in his best dark suit and shoes in the middle of the bed, with rosary beads in his hands and flowers on either side of him…. His face was powdered and made to look more like a street dandy than a factory worker…. like some aged gigolo instead of the bricklayer he was”

(12). Two candelabras at the head of the bed throw their shadows “against the walls like hulks of stone,” and other candles placed around the room create a grotesque atmosphere.

Around the bed are Assunta and some other “Black Madonnas,” immigrant women all engulfed by their black clothes, “a chorus of professional mourners” sobbing and wailing over Adamo‟s corpse. Everything is set up as if the scene were taking place in some village in Italy, while in fact the original community is absent, having probably mourned

Adamo‟s death upon his departure from the village. Emigration in rural societies has indeed been likened to death, “[f]or on a symbolic level [it] is a variant or a version of the passing away, of the journey of the deceased” (Pitto 127). “In remote Italian villages” – writes Joseph Pivato – “emigrants were once sent off with funeral-like rituals. Upon leaving, these people were no longer considered part of the community; in effect, they were dead to their families and friends” (“The Return” 171).5

Assunta, Giuseppe/Joey, and Maria/Marie are the only family members attending

Adamo‟s funeral, but the author places the siblings, literally, on a different level, as to emphasize the generational distance that lies at the heart of the narrative. Before entering

101 the bedroom to pay their last respects to Adamo, Joey and Marie wait in the basement, startled by the loud crying coming from upstairs, and concerned over their mother‟s irrational behavior. When Adamo had lost his long battle against cancer in a hospital room, Assunta, “in near hysterics” had opened the windows of that room “to let his spirit out.” Afterwards, she had taken his body from the funeral home into the house, and any attempt to reason with her had been of no use. “Their mother was old-country, but never to this extent” (BM 7). For the children, her actions appear completely out of context partly because they have never been exposed to Italian funeral rituals. Adamo‟s death is the first one in the family to occur on Canadian soil, and the ways in which it affects

Assunta are beyond their comprehension. They can only detect the physical consequences of it.

His mother‟s look said it all. Her face, reddened and swollen with weeping, was a hideous mask. Her lips were bloodied and her hair disheveled, as if she had been tearing at it. He couldn‟t look straight into her eyes. They had a crazed look about them that scared him…. She had become thinner then ever. It seemed her frame had slightly collapsed. She was hunched over. Her face had wrinkled badly…. her martyred expression. She was undeniably an old woman now…. [a]nd the black dress, along with the heavy black stockings and the kerchief, seemed to suit her perfectly. (9)

Assunta looks like a remnant of another time; in fact, the physical deterioration of her body prefigures her own death, as described at the end of the novel. But by assigning her a “martyred expression” and the characteristic appearance of a Black Madonna, Paci adds a religious quality to this figure, which makes her what I called a relic.

In the eyes of Joey and Marie, Assunta, at least initially, is a remnant, a dead fragment, a ruin, independently from her husband‟s death, but precisely because of her

102 stubborn attachment to “strange old-country customs that she insisted on maintaining even though they were primitive and embarrassing” (11). Like the other peasant women of the neighborhood, the Black Madonnas, she also “could‟ve stepped out of the middle ages” (13). Marie, the ingrata of the family, the one who is in eternal conflict with

Assunta and sets off to Toronto not to submit to her impositions, asks: “How can she be my mother if she‟s never had the slightest idea of who I was? … She‟s like a fossil. She‟s in the wrong time and the wrong country” (17). The term “fossil” is here used with a negative connotation of distance from what is outdated and displaced, but ambivalently so, since the “archeological” meaning that the word carries suggests that that remaining material is worth recovering and examining. In this implied act of preservation lies the connection between fossils and relics, although the latter, I will argue, entail a degree of mobilization of memory that, in Paci‟s writing, transcends the archeological recovery.

Moreover, this concept of the Italian migrant as a fossil, randomly scattered in the most unpredictable places, encompasses all the local community of the West End. “How could the southern Italians ever have come to Northern Ontario?” wonders Marie during the funeral cortège, while recalling the passage of the supreme symbol of imperialism, the Queen of England, through “a settlement of semi-subdued Italians” in the occasion of her visit to the local steel plant. Here the category of southern Italians comprises people of similar class origins and habits beyond precise geographical distinctions, as the example of Assunta, who comes from a central region, shows. Furthermore, Marie uses it in opposition to the culturally dominant power structure that so much appeals to her for its rational order that clearly contrasts with the illegible practices of her ethnic group. To eradicate the signs of her Italian affiliation, she has in fact left the Sault (a nickname

103 given to Sault Ste Marie) to study mathematics at a university in Toronto and has married an English Canadian Protestant man.

The transition from the inside of the Barones‟ house to the surrounding neighborhood, where Adamo‟s corpse is taken for the last time, reveals some important elements regarding the place/space dynamics. The accumulation of relics, of dead objects, intensifies as the focus shifts from Adamo‟s wasted body in the bedroom to the ravaged West End, “chipped away piece by piece” as a result of urban renewal. As Joey drives the limousine behind the hearse, we follow his gaze and thoughts through the external narrator.

From Our Lady of Mount Carmel they went down Cathcart toward the steel plant. A few houses still stood in this part of the neighborhood. They had been neglected so long, however, that they were in various states of disrepair. Built close together at the sidewalk, they had enclosed verandahs and fenced-in backyards with rickety sheds or garages. The Italian ones were easily distinguishable in the summer by their vegetable gardens …. They all had that imitation brick siding that had long been faded by its exposure to the steel-plant air. Joey knew it was only a matter of time before these too were torn down. (19-20)

This place hardly bears the signs of the past Italian presence and practices. The irreversible changes that have hit the old industrial area are under Joey‟s eyes everyday, as he still lives and works in the West End. Joey is the affectionate son who at age twenty-eight still has not left home, the family, and the Sault to go to Southern Ontario and chase his dream of becoming a professional hockey player. He works at the local steel plant like his father used to and knows that sooner or later he will have to sell their own house, which Adamo had re-built with his own hands. In the text, Paci draws attention on the causes of the dispersal of the Italian community of the West End. On the

104 one hand, the erection of the International Bridge (opened in 1962), connecting the twin cities of Sault Ste Marie on the Michigan-Ontario border, spells its demise by cutting a big section out of the Italian neighborhood. With the coming of urban renewal and city plans to make room for apartment buildings and senior citizens homes, the eyesores are demolished, shops are shut down, and houses owned by many Italians are sold to avoid expropriation and depreciation. On the other hand, the drastically reduced influx of

Italian migrants is rightly perceived as a destructive factor for the community by Adamo.

In one of the many flashbacks of the novel, he complains that the children are the first to move away from their parents to the East End: “They become English…. And Spina told me – he said people stopped coming from the old country. Porca miseria, what‟re you going to do? It‟s all finished. Things that you build, they have to be torn down. Look how many years I work on this house” (66). For Adamo, ethnicity relies on physical place, territoriality, and reiteration of practices. When these visible marks deteriorate, that identity is “finished.” Now that Adamo is deceased, his identification with the neighborhood remains but can only be conveyed through a lexicon of death. “You would lie there soaking in the dark, and your flesh would tan to the colour of your bones” (21) - thinks Joey while leaving the plant gate. These words are evoked later on, before the deserted streets of the West End: “No more kids on the street. No more ball park and school rink. There were the remnants left – remnants of the decayed body that had tanned to its bones.” (23)

In Black Madonna, the remnant as “place,” as decaying body (of both the migrant and the place that the migrant occupies) or opaque practice configures as relic whenever a devotional value is attached to it. But I claim that Paci‟s writing achieves its best results

105 when the relic as “place” interacts with a narrative of practices (or operations) that defy stability and actualize “spaces.” I will refer to this as a narrative of mobilized relics.

Fundamentally, the relic is ambivalent because its coincidence with either “place” or “space” depends on the subjective and generational viewpoint. For instance, those customs and people (like her parents) that Marie judges outdated, “something dead,” are also the same practices and individuals that have made the West End an Italian “space.” It is evident that two opposite models of relating oneself to Italy are at work: one based on the reproduction of old-world practices; the other founded on rejection of Italianness and desire to access the North American mainstream. According to de Certeau, operations specify spaces “by the actions of historical subjects” whereby “a movement always seems to condition the production of a space and to associate it with a history” (118). Because movement, in this case migration, is a key factor in the definition of historical subjects,

Francesco Loriggio has argued that Italian Canadians (including migrant parents) should be considered “new historical subjects” in the construction of the Italian nation, rather than “partners whose function is to learn and obey, to carry the torch, to constantly

Italianize themselves and keep silent” (27).6 In this sense, relics, in their double connotation of places and spaces in Black Madonna, represent a category for exploring the evolution of the ties with Italy and ethnicity in the passage from migrants to post- migrants, from one historical subject to another, both of which are, to different degrees, liminally positioned between cultures.

What I have suggested to term a narrative of mobilized relics, roughly corresponding to de Certeau‟s actualized spaces, along with what he calls “the play of changing relationships between places and spaces” in a story (118), is visible, for

106 example, in Paci‟s use of two overlapping temporal structures. The storyline follows

Adamo‟s death and culminates, six months later, with Assunta‟s own death, Marie‟s trip to Italy, the selling of the house, and Joey‟s new life with Annalise. A series of analepses, instead, takes the narrative back to when Marie and Joey were young kids, the Italian community was cohesive and the West End was a practiced place. As a whole, the passages back and forth provide an attentive account of the Italian migratory experience in the microcosm of the Sault.

Although a peripheral area of Northern Ontario, to Adamo, Assunta, and the other

Italian migrants “the Sault … was l’America” (BM 10). As such, it condenses all the expectations and paradoxes that America can conjure up. The Sault is both a land of opportunity and sacrifice for Assunta and Adamo. His job at the steel plant grants him the possibility of buying a house and a car, and to send his children to school well beyond his fifth-grade education.7 He is a proud and skilled bricklayer who tries to pass on his trade to his only son: “It‟s as honest and good work as you‟ll find. To build things that last when you die. To feel the brick in your hands - these pieces and blocks that make larger things than you are” (61-2). Adamo sets up a workbench in the cellar and with his tools fixes up their house and helps renovate the local Catholic church, although he is not a religious man and believes that religion is for women. By renovating the church, he contributes to a major symbol and gathering point of the Italian community, but he also puts into practice his work ethos, which to a bricklayer means to build durable “houses or churches or bridges.”

On the contrary, the plant is “no place for a real bricklayer” he tells Joey. This reveals that there is no full satisfaction in Adamo‟s work in that environment. In fact,

107 when his son goes to the Masonry changing-room to empty out his dead father‟s locker, he pictures Adamo as a “bricklayer going to the various furnaces to line them with fire- brick. Keeping the inferno going. Instead of building homes and bridges as he had always meant to” (63). Moreover, the fact that Adamo has been working for decades and is still working in that “inferno” when he becomes ill with cancer, reinforces the idea that the steel plant, and thus the Sault and l’America, is a source of good and bad life changes alike.

Joey also works in the plant, but, after ten years, he still considers his job “a temporary state of affairs” (58). Playing hockey professionally has long been his dream, but ever since his father discouraged him from pursuing a career in sports, Joey‟s life has been held in suspension. When Adamo dies, he finds himself with a mother that is still a mystery to him after almost thirty years, and a house that the city is trying to expropriate.

The death of his father is an awakening moment for Joey. Upon recovering Adamo‟s mason tools in the changing-room, the brick hammer, the trowels, the rule, the chisels, a strange and confusing feeling overcomes him. The trowel that Joey handles “could have been the first one [Adamo] had ever owned since his apprenticeship day in Italy” (63).

And from Italy come the shaving utensils in the room, objects that Adamo carefully uses over the years till they are completely worn out, which reveals a traditional frugal way of living. Later on, Joey finds out that laying bricks gives him satisfaction. By using his father‟s tools to start his trade, he thus resumes a tie with Adamo and, ideally, with Italy, where that family tradition had first originated.

Even though this kind of recognition stresses generational and ethnic continuity, the novel does not fail to notice that crucial changes intervene in the transition from

108 migrant to post-migrant generations. For instance, the swift transformations that wipe out the West End compel Joey to think of himself and his new activity beyond the borders of an enclosed ethnic group held together by strong its territorial ties, like the one his father had proudly helped to shape. At the end of the novel, Joey builds a pyramid in the back garden of their house, which he has sold due to the pressures of urban renewal. It is his last day there, so the pyramid will not last, but “it nevertheless would be hard to tear down” (198). While the construction of the pyramid is another symbolic act of reconnection with Adamo, the imminent destruction of the house indicates that Joey will have to make place in a different corner of the city.

His condition implies that “re-tracing” identity is more than just uncovering the strata of tradition like in an archeological operation, as it entails reinventing and redefining the elements of that tradition for the future generations according to the present circumstances in which each individual is enmeshed. On a more general level, the text seems to suggest, without going in depth, that the dispersal of the local community pushes it to disseminate, and likely refashion, its practices elsewhere, in other places.

This movement out marks, in de Certeau‟s terms, the “putting to death” of an Italian

“proper” place (121), the West End, and at the same time it establishes a new, still undefined, space “caught in the ambiguity of an actualization” and subject to be

“modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts” (117). Paci‟s novel is not so much concerned with this new unfolding space in which the Italian community, after losing control of a certain territory, may in the future reinvent itself, and where relics of the West End (people, objects, and practices) will still reappear, although in scattered order. Rather, it incorporates spatial disruption as a decisive element of

109 alteration into a representation of generational change that starts to emerge while the community is still in place, from within it, and most strikingly on the female side of the parent-children relationship.

In Black Madonna, place is gendered in accordance with the familial and social values embraced by the immigrants. Ramirez observes that in Canada the Italian migrants viewed family as a “cooperative enterprise whose material and emotional well-being was dependent on the specific roles that the various members were expected to perform”

(Italians 12). While Adamo is the breadwinner and the steel plant his workplace, Assunta is supposed to perform her role of wife and mother within the domestic confines, in contrast to many post-war migrant women who, in the bigger urban centers, worked in the factories (Princigalli, I got up; Ramirez Italians 13). In opposition to the female narrator of Cagli Seidenberg‟s Come ospiti, Assunta dreams of becoming a mother. In fact, this desire leads her to marry Adamo by proxy and leave her small village to never come back. Moreover, unlike Seidenberg‟s Italian characters, Paci‟s “Black Madonna” is inserted into a community of women with similar peasant backgrounds and customs that they proudly carry with them to the Sault.

It is unclear to what extent Assunta is incapable or unwilling to adapt to the new country, but it is patent that she “seemed she had gone from one Italian village in Marche to another one in Northern Ontario - the West End” (BM 11). Her stubbornness in conforming to the old-country rules is the result of various factors, such as resentment and fear. Joey remembers her complaining to Adamo: “How can I have come here?

How? I was so content in Novilara” or shouting at him “from suppressed rage” asking to go back home (94). “Any change to her surroundings was a threat to her. To move out …

110 was unthinkable. To ride in a car with her was an ordeal in itself. His father [Adamo] had been denied countless vacations” (93). The fear of change and of the outside reinforces

Assunta‟s own sense of authority inside the house, and at the dinner table in particular.

Assunta Barone was an absolute tyrant at the dinner table…. The table was like her theatre of operations and her rules were unquestionable. Whatever was put on the table had to be eaten…. If dinner was for four she cooked for six. If for six, there was food enough for eight. And woe to the person who didn‟t eat his full portions…. Nothing escaped her eye. She sat imperiously … and anticipated their every move. She directed operations as if managing a war game. Mangia this and that, she‟d say. Non è bastanza. (31-32)

The abundance of food that Assunta always displays on the table is, like the house, a visible measure of the material well-being that the Barone family has reached. Dishing out food is a daily ritual meant to exorcise the old specter of hunger. After all, indigence and hunger have been the primary causes of depopulation and social erosion for innumerable Italian villages.8 However, the determination that Assunta exhibits at the table also reveals an emotional struggle. She is concerned that “the English” may influence the eating habits of her daughter, for whom weight is an ongoing preoccupation. Assunta‟s despotic manners are thus also to be read as war operations against the North American cultural model that threatens her values: she contrasts the dominant order with her own rules.

It is worth noting that the war lexicon contained in the description above is reminiscent of the language that de Certeau adopts to define a “tactic” that is a

“calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus” (37). Tactics are ways of operating that the weak subject uses “within enemy territory” to fight or “trick” an order

111 imposed on it, without subverting it. In effect, Assunta‟s operations are ephemeral victories: they allow her to survive on alien grounds while being already challenged by her daughter, l’ingrata, pazza, stupida, as she indignantly calls her. Since her adolescence, Marie feels ashamed of her mother‟s habits: her screaming out loud “like a vulgar washerwoman,” keeping a chamber pot under her bed, “chattering like a magpie” at home with her friends. Assunta‟s failure to pick up the language is not only embarrassing but a main cause of incommunicability with her children who struggle to channel their thoughts in Italian or in her dialect. Marie breaks away from her mother first by rejecting her rules at the dinner table, then by no longer attending church, and ultimately by using education as a means to leave home and the West End, which she finds likewise intolerable. Within Paci‟s writing, Marie‟s bold resistance to her mother represents, in other words, a direct challenge to the very act of preservation of the migrant memory while embodying the children‟s liminal struggle for a self-fashioning identity.

In the social microcosm that Paci portrays, the church is another gendered place, a venue for religious practices and the most important symbol of the Italian presence. As in many other Italian communities abroad, it is a powerful promoter of associational life and national identity within the neighborhood. In section ten, Father Sarlo, the local priest, claims that migrant parishioners of the West End can only be understood through their connection with place: “What you have to know about these people, Joey … is that they come from places - villages and towns - where their families had lived for generations.

Coming to this country was like going to the ends of the earth for them. Like going to

China” (BM 159). Like love and family, he conceives the neighborhood as the fulfillment

112 of a need for the migrants, in this case the need to make a place like one‟s village “where everyone could know each other and where there was a sense of community” (159). As a crucial agent in this social project, the church summons its members to share responsibilities according to their gender roles and skills. For instance, in Black

Madonna, going to church or mourning are duties of women, while men‟s participation is limited to main religious festivities and the Festa of Our Lady of Mount Carmel procession. However, when skilled people are needed to renovate the church, the symbol of the Italian West End, builders like Adamo are called in to share the effort because “a village is nothing without the house of God” (159). Conversely, once the urban renewal sets in and the neighborhood drops its homogeneous ethnic identity, the church loses its aggregating function and the presence of an Italian priest is not necessary anymore, as the imminent replacement of Father Sarlo with an Irish priest suggests.

Father Sarlo‟s character is relevant to my analysis of relics in Paci, as he facilitates, in my view, the reassessment of the migrant parent as relic that is vital to the construction of a devotional mode of writing. As an immigrant from Calabria, he acts as a cultural interpreter between the old and the new generation. After Adamo‟s death,

Assunta‟s behavior changes dramatically and in ways that Joey cannot grasp. He first takes her to a psychiatrist but to no avail since she does not follow “the rules” of the game (154-5). Then, he turns to Father Sarlo, the only person she opens up to. The priest tells Joey about ancient customs that the widow is expected to observe in certain Italian villages, and that Assunta seems to conform to. Always in her black mourning dress and kerchief that hides her hair cut down to the skin, Assunta spends the day sleeping on the sofa in front of the TV, which she can barely understand; going to church; reading the

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Grand Hotel magazine; and, when spring arrives, walking in the fields by the tracks

“seeing if the cicoria is out” (81). In the past, picking dandelions had been a practice with a purpose – bringing food to the table – and surely involving “a lot of dreaming to make these fields seem like the land she had never wanted to leave” (174). But after her husband‟s death, walking in those fields for the widowed Assunta merely means “lacking a place,” in de Certeau‟s vocabulary, performing an operation emptied of its original dream and goal (towards the end she wanders without even picking dandelions). Walking thus becomes a “leftover” that anticipates the character‟s own physical transformation into an inert object, a dead body. In fact, to easily reach the fields Assunta starts using the tracks near her house, something dangerous and unacceptable for a respectable woman according to “an unwritten rule in the neighbourhood” (82). Ironically, beside those tracks, Joey one day finds her body sliced in half by the train, the same means that had taken her first away from her village and later to the Sault.

In the last sections of the novel, the images of Assunta‟s uprootedness echo those used by Corrado‟s in Il Tempo dei Dioscuri to convey the violence of being transplanted elsewhere. First, while searching for his mother in the fields, Joey thinks that “unlike dandelions, people couldn‟t be uprooted quite so easily” (174-5). And later on, while hugging his sister, turned as thin as Assunta, he imagines that “she was still in a way alive in his arms, thin and bony and still unyielding, like a proud tree torn from its roots and left to petrify on unnatural ground” (180). But whereas for Corrado the solution to the suffering of transplantation coincides with the return to Italy, for Assunta the sacrifice ends with her own death abroad. In Black Madonna, as well as in Italian Shoes, the return journey is in fact carried out by the migrant‟s children as a way of coming to terms with

114 their Italian identity, a process that implies both continuity and rupture from the parents, and a personal re-invention of ethnicity. In Black Madonna, Marie, the ingrata, is the one that at the end of the novel boards a plane to Italy to attend her cousin‟s wedding in

Novilara. In other words, she makes the trip that Assunta had always dreamed of. Joey notes that she “didn‟t look out of place” among those Italian-looking people at the gate

(198). Moreover, the black dress that she wears and that had belonged to Assunta, accentuates her resemblance with her mother, thus revealing one of the ironic changes that Maries undergoes throughout the novel. Another one being, for instance, her progressive disillusionment with the city, which she had envisioned as the anti-Italian

West End and where instead her ethnic background helps her land a teaching position at a moment of economic distress.9

If Paci uses Adamo‟s carpentry and bricklaying tools to reconnect Joey to his father, he reconfigures the mother-daughter relationship through Assunta‟s trousseau trunk or bavulo, the wooden chest containing the dowry and traditionally passed on to the daughter, in Southern Italy. To borrow from Bachelard‟s poetic images of chests, drawers and wardrobes, the bavulo is not an everyday piece of furniture, nor is it opened daily. It is an “intimate” space not accessible to just anybody and displaying an order not merely geometrical but that “can also remember the family history” (78). Assunta keeps the trunk locked, thus feeding for a long time Marie‟s fantasies that the “Hope Chest” may hide some noble family origins: “A scandal maybe. Like she was the illegitimate daughter of a grand duke sent to America to safeguard a reputation” (BM 194). When she finally opens it, after Assunta‟s death, she notices that “as she dug deeper the contents appeared to be older, as if she were unearthing various layers of a person‟s life” (190).

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She finds bed linens, clothes, a black dress, family pictures, and some religious items that she uses, as relics, to set up a shrine. From the pictures, she gets “a good sense of the land” and of the “people of the earth” her mother came from. On the one hand, Marie cherishes these objects and the trip to Novilara is an indication of her willingness to understand her mother (and herself) by going back to the soil that had shaped her identity.

In this regard, Mark Trecroci‟s journey in Italian Shoes represents the actualization of

Marie‟s project. On the other hand, the conclusion of Black Madonna hints at a break from the mother since Marie decides to take the bavulo to Italy and give it as a wedding present to her cousin Marisa, the daughter of Assunta‟s sister. By doing so, she ultimately mobilizes a relic or transforms a “place” into a “space,” in de Certeau‟s language. Indeed, she reinserts the trunk into a cultural circuit whereby, as opposed to Canada, passing down this object from mother to daughter is a signifying practice.

2.2 BENDING TO THE GROUND: RETURN AND ART OF WRITING IN ITALIAN SHOES

With its focus on family, neighborhood, and intergenerational miscommunication, Black

Madonna offers a complex overview of the identity issues that postwar Italian migrants and especially their children faced in Canada. The relationship to this country is a central concern for Paci as a writer, but it is also inevitably interlocked with his view of Italy, italianità, and the cultural, social, and emotional values that these words carry in the life of Italian Canadians. Father Sarlo‟s perspective on migrants and place, and Marie‟s projected trip to Italy, seem to suggest that, at some point, traveling to the old country must substitute for the parents‟ stories about it. In other words, the absence of place

116 stimulates a personal journey of discovery of the ancestors‟ context of origin, which also translates into a direct confrontation with the locus primus of one‟s liminality, as Kym

Ragusa‟s text will confirm in the next chapter. To refer to the previous chapter, none of the characteristics of the return journeys in Cagli Seidenberg‟s works are applicable to the trips of Paci‟s characters. Unlike Ebe in Il Tempo dei Dioscuri, Marie or Mark

Trecoci are aware of their liminality and hybrid identity well before traveling to Italy.

And while Marie‟s plan is left suspended in Black Madonna, a perusal of Mark Trecoci‟s trip will reveal a different experience of the Italian nation as seen by a second-generation

Italian Canadian writer.

Published in 2002 and winner of the Bressani Literary Prize in 2004, Italian Shoes is the fifth novel in a series of seven books that trace the development of Mark Trecoci as an artist and a young man. In the first two installments of Paci‟s Kunstlerroman, Black

Blood (1991) and Under the Bridge (1992), Mark, from the middle of his life, tells us about his childhood and youth in the Sault, immersed in a cultural setting that echoes that of Black Madonna. Mark does not identify with his parents‟ peasant culture and through reading he aims at “displacing” his father‟s blood. In fact, to him, the printed word –

“black blood” - is like the writer‟s blood transported onto paper.10 To achieve a more mature sense of self and become a writer, Mark abandons the Sault, his family and ethnic background in Sex and Character (1993) and The Rooming-House (1996). Nonetheless, his vocation and Margaret Laurence‟s advice to write about his Italian background, bring the protagonist and first-person narrator to visit his relatives in Novilara (Assunta‟s hometown), his native town, Pesaro, and a few Italian cities, namely Florence, Venice, and Rome.

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For some aspects, Mark‟s return journey recasts, in a fictionalized form, Frank

Paci‟s own return to his birthplace, in 1972, after a long absence. In an interview with

Dino Minni conducted in 1984, Paci declared:

In 1972, twenty years after my family had emigrated, I went back to Italy for my first trip. I didn‟t realize it at that time, but this trip was the catalyst that finally made me see that I had to come to terms with my Italian background before I could write about anything else…. The trip dramatically impressed upon me the wide gulf between the Canadian and the Italian cultures and the depth of my heritage, which I had been too naïve and stupid to appreciate. [It] also made me appreciate my parents…. Beforehand I had only seen them in the context of Northern Ontario Canada…. Seeing them from the Italian context completed the picture, so to speak (in Pivato, F. G. Paci 132).

That the return journey can work as a powerful stimulus for writing is true of many

Italian Canadians (Pivato, “The Return”). For instance, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, editor of the first anthology of Italian Canadian poetry, Roman Candles (1978), states in the

Preface: “In 1974 I returned to Italy for the first time in twenty-odd years…. I went out of curiosity and came back to Canada conscious of the fact that I‟d been a man without a country for most of my life.”11 More important, however, is the question of how the return trip can influence writing and possibly make it participate in a larger cultural project about migration. In the same 1984 interview, and in later conversations with

Pivato (1990 and 2001, in Pivato, F. G. Paci), Paci commented on the “need” underlying his writing:

there is a need to preserve the accomplishment of my parents, with the accent on „serve.‟ I had the voice which they didn‟t have. It‟s this very sense of preserving that acts as a catharsis, because as you‟re writing the story of your parents you‟re

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also coming to terms with your background and defining yourself in an historical context.” (Pivato, F. G. Paci 133)

In part – explains the author - this objective came as a reaction to the gangsters and other

“flamboyant” ethnic stereotypes which were dominating the media in the 1970s and that for Paci did not provide a comprehensive representation of the Italian experience. In contrast, he “felt obligated … to render the immigrant experience of the ordinary and hardworking people” and to use a realist style that, in his view, was “honest” to that background and able “to make it readable” to the same people he wanted to honor (140).

Paci‟s notion of preservation reconnects to the key issues of voice and language that I raised in relation to Seidenberg‟s writing in my first chapter. I will discuss later the epistemological question of whether or not we can listen to the voices of silenced people.

First, however, I will try to show how Paci‟s declared goal of serving ordinary people through art is matched by Mark Trecroci‟s commitment to unbury the untold story of his migrant father in Italian Shoes. My argument is that in Mark‟s (and Paci‟s) aesthetic imagination, the blank page becomes itself a possible religious place onto which the writer can “carry in” people that are voiceless, and thus dead in the sense of being culturally marginalized, buried in oblivion. In order to substantiate this argument, I will specifically consider Mark‟s spatial positioning with respect to a few places that are relevant to his Italian journey of self-discovery, namely, the farm near Novilara, and three different burial sites that he visits in Novilara, Pesaro, and Rome.

The movement between space (in a broad sense) and writing is fundamentally different, almost inverted, in Black Madonna and Italian Shoes (IS): in the former the

119 power of “black blood” is deployed to preserve impermanent “places” and practices on the verge of dispersal (e.g., Italian life in the West End), whereas in the latter the exploration of space sheds light on Mark‟s writing project. Indeed, Mark is more than just a tourist in Italy; he is above all an aspiring writer who seeks in his native country the foundations of his art. As he states in the fourteenth chapter (of nineteen): “I was in the business of connections, after all. My words were connectors that rooted themselves in the soil of who I was” (IS 136). Quite literally, the soil provides a vantage point to grasp

Mark‟s human and artistic maturation. In the opening chapter, during his flight to Rome, he introduces himself as a young man who has “erased everything Italian” (9) growing up in the Sault. Like Marie, the educated Mark feels ashamed of his parents and ethnic affiliation: “They were all waiters. Construction workers. Janitors. Labourers at the steel plant. It hit me like a steel ball that these were the people I came from. Not doctors and lawyers and businessmen. Not even any gangsters. Just ordinary uneducated immigrants…” (14). Once in Italy, Mark first stops in Novilara to stay with his mother‟s sister, zia Rosa, and one day they visit the farm of zia Gina, his father‟s sister. As they stroll through the lush fields, vineyards and orchards, zia Gina gives Mark a glimpse of their family life in the 1930s and of his father Nicolino‟s sacrifices:

Our father had to take him out of school in Novilara to help out on the farm. We worked like beasts, from dark to dark. Even at one a.m. we had to feed le mucche. Then wake up at four to plough the land. It got too hot at ten. So we went indoors for lunch, then slept a few hours, and worked straight from two to eleven at night…. Nicolino was such a hard worker. (58-9)

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Gina also makes clear that “nothing is wasted” on a farm but transformed: the manure of the cows (what she calls la merda di Dio, the shit of God) enriches the soil that in turn grows food for animals and humans alike. From the earth comes life, but some years it

“only yields dead bodies” - points out Gina - as to emphasize how much the subsistence of the farmers relies on the soil. Her words help Mark understand the context of origin of ordinary people like his father, and dispel the negative image of the Italian migrant described above. In fact, Mark eventually identifies with Nicolino during his second visit to Gina‟s farm, where he takes his Canadian friends to experience the industrious life of a real farmer. While helping out with the harvest, Mark smells the juicy grapes all over his body: “A sudden shiver ran through me. I could feel my father‟s presence inside me, his bashful grin, his life in this valley, all that he had left to come to the new country.

„You‟re not a kid anymore,‟ he said. „That‟s only the one thing.‟ Thanks, Babbo, I said to him inside me. You did your best” (118). This kind of reconnection, which echoes that between Joey and Adamo, underlines a passage into manhood for Mark, but it also gives a symbolic meaning to the place where the father-son link is restored.

In the book, the farm is overall idealized and set in opposition to the major Italian cities that by 1972 had already seen epochal transformations:

Ferrari was making fine automobiles in Torino. RAIUNO and DUE were broadcasting concerts and soccer games. The fashion industry in Milano was one of the best in the world. The resurgence of the economy in the 1960s had catapulted the country to a leading industrial power. La bella figura was rampant all over the country. But this farm had remained inviolate. Certain things never change, my father used to say. La merda di Dio, the shit of God, was still the rich earth of his backyard garden. (57)

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In a country that is visibly changing at an unequal pace, Mark seems to be more interested in uncovering the strata of its past than exploring its present industrial advancement. While in Novilara, Pesaro or in bustling cities flooded with tourists, he voraciously delves into the rich fabrics of past Italy through a series of passageways - churches, museums, galleries, catacombs, streets and piazzas - that showcase a “once resplendent culture” (185). In contrast, contemporary Italy appears to him as a decadent country, rather than an industrial power, which inspires sentimental affection on the one hand (“I liked its colours, its layers of magazines in the kiosks, its bar-cafés…its wounded pride” 184-5), and unapologetic criticism on the other hand for la bella figura, the target of Mark‟s scorn throughout his journey. He detects an extreme, excessive care for appearance in the way people dress, talk, and keep their houses spotless: “It was pomp and circumstances that amounted to nothing more than saving face. It was spectacle and display” (185). A comment that, curiously, calls to mind Cagli

Seidenberg‟s Italian “suspended” narrators and their views of the American society.

By saying that la bella figura “was rampant all over the country,” Mark remarks the presence of a widespread narcissistic attitude that functions beyond gender, class, and geographical barriers. For instance, the “Italian shoes” that his working-class relatives make him buy after his arrival exemplify the typical concern for cutting la bella figura:

“Now you are really Italian, professore” (31) his Communist uncle, Vittorio (Rosa‟s husband), mocks him. And later on, his cousin Marcella, a pre-school teacher, hints “now you must get some good shirts…. you don‟t want to make la brutta figura…. the people in Italy, they judge everything with the eye…. You must be an entertainment for the eye.”

“All the time?” “Sì, sì” (48). As soon as Mark wears his new pair of beige summer shoes,

122 he does not feel “so foreign anymore” (31) but at the end of his trip, he looks at them while recalling all the places that they have taken him to throughout Italy, and concludes:

“I would put away my Italian shoes and write about my father” (186). In other words, the act of reconnecting with the father through writing postulates for the protagonist the shift of his gaze from “spectacle and display” to la merda di Dio (envisioned as relic, to a great extent), to the earth and the values that his humble folks observe in the farm: hard work, simple lifestyle, and reciprocal help.

At times, in defending the modest life that his relatives lead on the farm, Mark sounds “so idyllic” and “a mite biblical” (133), as his Italian Canadian friend Tony observes. Mark, in fact, portrays the farm as a self-sufficient social reality, “a city onto themselves” (130) in which down-to-earth people live off the land, grow their own food, and only have exchanges with the outside to sell their produce. This autarchic and romanticized image, which still resonates with a number of Italians abroad, leaves out some crucial aspects of the farmers‟ life, such as the fact that zia Gina and zio Giovanni own the farm, but not the land they cultivate. As mezzadri (sharecroppers), they allot half of the harvest to the padrone while they cannot afford anything better than eating their meals in a kitchen that is right next to the stable.12 Moreover, because of all the work required in the fields, their three children (Tomasso, Gasparo, and Milena) have little experience of the world outside, and, well in their thirties and forties, have not yet married. These elements resist Mark‟s simplistic view by hinting at a subaltern local reality where economic exploitation materializes in unequal share of toil and crops among padroni and mezzadri. But unfortunately, such conflicts only marginally emerge

123 in the text, as fragments of Mark‟s exchanges with his relatives, and thus remain in the background, a minor point in the main character‟s exploration of the soil of identity.

The farm is not the only place in the novel where bending to the ground represents more than just a physical exercise for the protagonist. Burial sites provide helpful images to grasp his approach to family and nation, and his maturation as a writer.

Furthermore, by bringing into focus the life-death relationship, burial sites well insert themselves in the dialectics of “place” and “space” that is the backbone of Paci‟s aesthetics. In chapter three, Mark is struck by the corpse of a girl lying in a glass coffin under an altar, in a side chapel of the Duomo of Pesaro.

It was a young girl saint dressed in sumptuous robes who had died about a century ago. Her facial skin was like porcelain, her teeth solid behind her ghastly smile, her bony feet protruding from the bottom of the robe. “How is that possible, zio?” “Are you a believer, Marco?” he gave me a sly glance. “No,” I shook my head. “ We Italians, sometimes, live in the middle ages,” he shook his head with displeasure. “We all live through our senses. We need the pictures and the statues. We can‟t even let a little girl die in peace.” … “In this region, Marco, every church from Ancona and Loreto to Urbino has a beatified corpse. Or a body part of a saint.” “Like Maria Goretti,” I said, remembering my mother‟s favourite saint and martyr. My mother had pictures of her preserved body in a glass coffin and used to speak of her as a Marchigiana. “Yes, the virgin martyr. She was born not too far from here, you know, close to Ancona…. We call her the St. Agnes of the twentieth century. Everyone in Marche was so proud of her when she was canonized in 1950…. During that time I remember all the young ladies, including your aunt, who thought twice about marriage.” “It is such – how do you say? – a paradox?” I said in English. “you live through the senses and yet you want girls to be virgins.” (32-3)

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In the following chapter, Vittorio, Rosa and Marcella take Mark to pay a visit to the graves of his grandparents in the cemeteries of Candelara and Pesaro.

The picture of my paternal grandfather showed him in a felt hat and large black moustache, in a dark pin-stripe suit with large lapels – the same photograph I had seen back in the Sault. He cut the bella figura of a nineteenth century grandee, with his elbow resting on an ornate pedestal…. Now it was clear to me that this was the only formal photograph ever taken of him…. At the Pesaro cemetery they showed me my maternal grandparents. It was the same type of cemetery wall, with thousands of marble facades, with oval pictures and vases…. [Zia Rosa] took out the old flowers in the vase and put new ones in, making the sign of the cross. Her lips moved silently in prayer. I had the impression that this was a common ritual. Visiting the cemetery. Death was as close to them as the pictures and writing on the wall…. When my mother had learned of her father‟s death, she had shut herself in her bedroom for days…. Lianna and I heard terrifying screams in the night. “Let me go home! Let me go home!” “We don‟t have photographs in North America,” I told zio. “We need remembrances for the eyes, Marco. The dead feed the living in Italy. The living feed the dead.” (44-6)

And finally, after a second visit to both sites, towards the end of the trip, Mark goes to see the Roman catacombs of St. Callixtus, St. Sebastian, and St. Agnes.

The catacombs fascinated me. My researches told me the mass graves produced the founding blocks of Christianity…. Death had fed life…. A bus got me to the two largest, St. Callixtus and St. Sebastian….The tombs of popes and martyrs went back to the Third century. I saw faded examples of Christian art, as well as many inscriptions and symbols. The inscriptions were the first graffiti, Father Cosimo said…. I saw pictures of shepherds, scenes from the Old and New Testaments, of Orpheus going into the underworld, ships, anagrams…. “The early Christians believed that death was but a temporary sleep before eternal life,” the monk explained. “Before the Second Coming. Many graffiti have the word sleep in them. Death was but a birth to a new life, a passing through the sleep of death, so that this intense belief made them suffer all manner of persecution and violence….”

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The early Christians would come to the catacombs, where the martyrs were buried, Padre Cosimo told us, and gathered strength from the bones of the martyrs. Martyrdom was their artwork to God. I listened carefully and it hit me. It hit me plain and powerfully. The dome of St. Peter‟s had been the wrong place. “Religiosum autem locum…” He quickly translated. “Each person makes the place that belongs to him a religious place at his own election by the carrying of his dead into it.” (168-9)

Cemeteries, catacombs, crypts, burial chambers, shrines, constitute “places,” according to de Certeau‟s terminology; they are reliquaries, receptacles of relics, of dead bodies. Nevertheless, as the examples above show, in Italian Shoes, such “places” become significant for their correlation to a series of religious and cultural practices that invest them and by which in turn they are invested. The reciprocal outcome is summed up in Vittorio‟s statement that in Italy the dead feed life to the living13 while being fed by them (bottom of the second passage). What makes this exchange possible is the power of images, the visual impact of a corpse in a coffin, of a photograph on a gravestone, or of the bones of a martyr. While religious imagery and Catholic rituals are highlighted in all three descriptions (as well as in Mark‟s last name, Trecroci, “three crosses”), in the first two Paci inscribes them in the postwar and current socio-political climate in order to expose them to a cultural critique.14

In the first passage, the paradox of living “through the senses” while wanting

“girls to be virgins” stems from the Church‟s use of the body as a means of control over the masses. Indeed, Maria Goretti, a farm girl who at age eleven in 1902 chose death over rape, is taken as an example of the Church practice to turn a body into a model of purity and sanctity based on aversion to sex. Mark‟s leftist uncle critically observes that her canonization in 1950 affected young Italian women‟s social and sexual behavior, and that

126 such notions as “purity at any cost” and “home and church” (referred to women‟s social spaces) still have currency in spite of the upheavals of the late sixties (33). Vittorio holds

Catholicism accountable for instigating the “need” for pictures and statues among the population on a national level (“We Italians….We all live through our senses… ”).

However, when he reframes this concept in relation to the specific case of Maria Goretti, he admits that “everyone in Marche was so proud of her” on the day of her canonization, thus suggesting that the proliferation of religious relics on the national territory is boosted by forms of regional campanilismo that reinforce the power of the Church locally, and even outside the national borders of Italy. In fact, the parochial perception of the saints and their corpses as “proper” often travels with the migrants: Mark‟s mother speaks of

Goretti as a fellow Marchigiana in Canada, while the “pictures of her preserved body” continue to supply her with the moral message of the Church.

In the second passage, we are reminded of the close contact with the dead through the ritual of visiting the cemetery. Putting new flowers in a vase, making the sign of the cross, and moving the lips in quasi-silent prayer are common elements of this ritual performance, and symbolic ways of feeding the body buried in the grave, in exchange for protection and strength in daily life. Photographs and inscriptions facilitate the dialogue with the dead, but “remembrances for the eye” can sometimes be delusory, especially when shown out of context. Mark notes that the same picture of his grandfather, which appeared to portray a “great landowner” to his eyes, as a child in the Sault, turns out to be the “only formal photograph” that a mezzadro had ever taken. Therefore, Mark ties this type of images into the contradictions of la bella figura that he constantly reminds us of.

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The last passage shifts the attention from the role of religious imagery in modern society and family to early Christianity. Conceptually, it remains close to the previous ones insofar as it too adopts the metaphor of death that feeds life. As Father Cosimo explains, for the first Christians, the catacombs were indeed places where the passage rite between life and death came to symbolize a transition to new eternal life, which gave the believers the courage to endure persecution and suffering. In these burial sites, therefore, people “gathered strength from the bones of the martyrs.” In spite of the figurative and functional resemblance between these relics and those contained in the previous passages

(the corpse of a saint and the picture/body of the deceased), the catacombs feed the narrator‟s artistic imagination rather than spurring on his sociological comments. Mark goes to the catacombs by himself, not as a believer of God looking for the origins of his faith, but because he is “fascinated” by the generative/creative power of death. The image of the first Christians that “gathered strength from the bones of the martyrs” comes as an epiphany and clings to him, as the above passage and the subsequent repetition of the phrase in the text show (173, 180). Evidently, the character‟s point of view strongly reflects the author‟s own fascination with relics and his belief that these empower the writer and the act of writing.

Remarkably, Mark‟s reaction is expressed in spatial terms: “It hit me plain and powerfully. The dome of St. Peter‟s had been the wrong place.” Wrong with respect to what? He does not say, but he clearly draws a charged dichotomy between dome and catacombs, which reflects a perspectival change from a previous supposedly “wrong” overlooking position to a correct vision from below. In the novel, this partly corresponds to the protagonist‟s shift from regarding himself as “a prince amongst peasants” (46) to a

128 more humble approach to his “ordinary” ethnic heritage. In this sense, the act of repositioning at (under)ground level from the dominant viewpoint of the dome has strong theoretical implications, as we will see. At the same time, Mark‟s visit to the catacombs also becomes an allegory of his search for a genuine voice. If the farm provides him with a topic (i.e., family history and peasant culture), the catacombs reveal the potential religious quality of writing, since “each person makes the place that belongs to him a religious place at his own election by the carrying of his dead into it.” This affirmation underpins my argument that Paci himself is a devout writer who constructs the writing space by carrying into it “his dead.” A reconfiguration of the religious place whereby the text is seen as catacomb can be empowering for the liminal writer (Mark/Paci) in that the operation of “carrying in” the dead is an act not so much of burying as of bringing to new life. This idea is forcefully conveyed in the last passage and in Mark‟s subsequent attempt “to visualize” – once in the catacombs - “what it was like thousands of years ago.

The Roman citizens carrying another body in…. on the threshold of a new life” (170). By visualizing movement, chants, and the festive atmosphere of those people, Mark acts here not as a simple spectator but as a young artist who exercises his creative abilities in view of his goal of feeding life to the dead. Again, this attitude is clearly reminiscent of Paci‟s objective to “serve” the migrants, whom he envisions as forgotten, voiceless, subjects.

On occasion, throughout the novel, Mark amusingly identifies himself with the orphan boy of the movie Marcelino pan y vino (aptly turned into “Marcolino, pan e vino”) who resuscitates the crucified Christ by feeding him bread and wine and who eventually dies in his arms, so great his desire to go to heaven.15 Even expunged of its literal meaning, Marcelino‟s miracle remains a powerful childhood memory that Mark

129 recovers and recasts according to his artistic aim: he can use the “black blood” in the way

Marcelino uses bread and wine to perform the miracle of bringing Christ to life. In a broader sense, this is another instance of Paci‟s adaptation of religious images and practices to articulate his ethically driven effort of carrying modern relics and dead objects onto the page. Furthermore, Mark‟s attempt “to visualize” the early Romans carrying bodies in the catacombs and his resort to Marcelino pan y vino (and other films such as The Wizard of Oz and Fellini‟s Roma) hint at the visual nature and cinematic influence in Paci‟s writing, alongside its religious roots. As specified in the last passage, images interact with the written word at a deep level so much so that the boundaries between them become blurred (“The inscriptions were the first graffiti”). Given Paci‟s goal of “serving” ordinary migrants by “preserving” cultural memory, some questions to be addressed are then: how can writing reflect the migratory experience in such a way to give voice to people who cannot speak? What are the linguistic challenges implied in this operation? And what kind of theoretical contribution can Paci‟s notion of “preservation” and his view of history from below bring to current critical reflections on the cultures of migration and Italian national identity?

2.3 CAN THE DECONTEXTUALIZED SUBALTERN SPEAK? VOICE AND ORDINARY LANGUAGE

In asserting that “seeing [his parents] from the Italian context completed the picture,” and urged him to write about their accomplishments, Paci calls for a consideration of migrants that embraces their double status of immigrants in one country and emigrants in another.16 But to regard his “history-from-below” approach to literature within a

130 celebratory optic of the migrant would merely reinforce romanticized views that deny the historicization of Italian emigration. In fact, “preservation” can itself be indicative of such denial if it amounts to a search for abstract notions of cultural authenticity and a past to reify (in this category falls Mark‟s regard of the “unviolate” farm in Italian

Shoes).This kind of preservation, in de Certeau‟s terms, would configure writing as

“place,” in that it would “allow us to grasp only a relic set in the nowhen of a surface of projection,” with the result that, contrary to Paci‟s goal, this fixation on the page would become a “procedure for forgetting” (de Certeau 97). I argue, instead, that by problematizing the act of preserving through the mobilization of relics, Paci‟s works suggest a construction of the writing space that resonates, in fact, with de Certeau‟s

“space” as a practiced place. If “space is like the word when it is spoken… caught in the ambiguity of an actualization” (117), then this ambiguity is embodied in Paci‟s liminal writing by the peculiar relationship between the oral and the written word. I will point out in the conclusion that de Certeau distrusts the possibility of configuring writing as

“space” because, according to him, in the western culture, writing has constituted itself against voices and orality. I contend, however, that within migratory texts such as Paci‟s the relation between oral and written, although intrinsically ambivalent, is paramount to our understanding of migration cultures and ought to be seen outside of a passive concept of preservation and within the transformative perspective of liminality.

In describing the writing process, Paci, through Mark, urges to include preservation in the optic of connection:

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The cena was subdued that evening. I was very tired from being with people all day. These people were my people, but I had grown up on a foreign soil. I was anxious to leave the next day. I was anxious to let everything I had seen and heard settle down and mix with my memories and form newer connections. I was in the business of connections, after all. My words were connectors that rooted themselves in the soil of who I was. (IS 136)

For Paci, the writing space is where the perceptions of the outside world, blended with memories, materialize in words that, rather than being dead traces of the past (i.e., preserving as putting to death), produce newer connections that continuously reshape the identity of the writer and his ties to the outside. I would also add that the memory that

Paci‟s writing, as a “business of connections,” is able to recover must be cast within a future-oriented approach in order for newer connections to form between Italy and its emigrant cultures. Either we imagine these connections in individual or broadly cultural terms, the issue of the oral-written relation remains crucial to the definition of Paci‟s writing “space.” With this purpose in mind, I will address issues of voice and language by linking the insights of such scholars as Verdicchio and Spivak to some specific questions that Paci raises from his peculiar position of an Italian-born author writing in

English in Canada.

Paci shares with de Certeau and Subaltern Studies historians an interest in the absent voice, in ordinary people and everyday practices, oral culture, and its traces. In

Black Madonna, Italian Shoes, and his interviews, Paci adopts a “history-from-below” perspective that is reminiscent of the Subaltern Studies notion of “bending closer to the ground in order to pick up the traces of a subaltern life in its passage through time.”17

Nevertheless, Paci‟s writing needs to be understood in the light of its ties with the historical phenomenon of Italian emigration and with the Canadian cultural context. Like

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Pasquale Verdicchio, I believe that migration “can play a key role in undermining the homogenizing dominant image of particular nations” (98). In Bound by Distance,

Verdicchio offers a reading of postcolonial discourse in relation to the process of Italian nation building arguing that “as unrecognized postcolonials, Southern Italian immigrants to North America are among those groups that straddle the borders of nationalism, ethnicity, and race in a continuous identity flux” (98).18 In Verdicchio‟s view, Southern

Italian migrants are “decontextualized subalterns” that maintain links with the cultures of the places of provenance and arrival, both of which adopt official mechanisms to sustain a system of dominance and subordination. In dealing specifically with Italian Canadian writing, Verdicchio states:

Italian Canadians are suspended between the English/French Canadian reality and their own cultural background. The result might be depicted as a center/margin relationship in which every single act and thought entails a continuous switching of subject positions from the center to the margins, and back again. Such circumstances engender a play of multiple personalities and unstable subject positions where the languages of thought and expression do not necessarily match, where intellectual and social life conflict, and where opposition to a dominant culture may manifest itself as an internal, rather than external experience. (118)

The unstable center/margin relationship outlined by Verdicchio, and echoing in what I refer to as liminality in this project, has to do with a sense of displacement due to the experience of emigration as well as the cultural impositions that migrants face in the new country. Like other authors, Paci has found himself in the position of working in a language different from his mother tongue and within a Canadian setting dominated, since the early 1970s, by a form of multiculturalism that official institutions have

133 conceived of more as a “strategy of containment” of diversity (Verdicchio 119) than a means to achieve full cultural democracy.19 On the one hand, the urgency of many writers to come to terms with their ethnic background has resulted in a conspicuous cultural production. On the other hand, the “strategy of containment” at work in Canada and designed to manage cultural diversity at different levels (education, language, publishing, funding, etc.) has imposed the mode of expression of such cultural production, so that it largely articulates itself either in English or French.20 Therefore, Italian Canadian writers are constantly involved in a cultural journey between places, languages, and traditions that are constructed as “center” or “margin” according to the institutionalized Canadian multiculturalism. These writers are “in the fortunate and tragic position of having to live with two cultures, one more exterior than the other” (Di Cicco 9-10). In fact, the example of Paci, and many others, shows that the cultures at play are three, since the same center- margin dynamic exists for the local-national Italian cultural background. According to

Deleuze and Guattari‟s definition of “minor literature,”21 these are “minority” writers who use and alter a major language (English or French) to confront the dominant culture from within, by making that tool flexible and open to unexpected trajectories.

In Black Madonna, language is often manipulated to accommodate linguistic expressions that represent local dialectal forms (e.g., “Youse guys don‟t know the first thing about hockey”) and migrants‟ utterances. Adamo articulates his thoughts and concerns about the future of the family in English: “You‟re not a kid anymore” he tells

Joey, or “Whattsa matter with this [car]? […] When a machine runs good, you don‟t change it […]. And when your parents are old – do you put them in the scrap heap?” (62).

On the contrary, linguistic adaptation is impossible for Assunta. Her socio-cultural

134 displacement is conveyed through code-switching, native dialect (which her own children can barely speak), and using body language. In chapter six, questioned by Joey about her strange habit of going out to the fields, Assunta insists “I have to get the cicoria,

Giuseppino” (81). That unconventional and socially “unacceptable” act of walking the tracks to the fields to pick dandelions has the same contestatory function of a speech act - as de Certeau would put it - that she can never fully articulate in English. On her return home, she removes her kerchief, and the view of her hair, cut to the skin, bewilders Joey:

“Mamma, can‟t we talk” he pleads, and frowning, she says: “Talk?... Di che cosa?

About what, giovanotto?” shaking her hand at him “in the particular gesture of throwing the question back into his face,” “You hair.” “Ma, stai zitto, … Go to bed Joey. Go play your hockey. Don‟t get into things you don‟t understand” (83). At this point the verbal communication stops, and a sense of frustration prevails: Joey, raged at his mother, slaps her over the head. Assunta, quickly transmuting her face from the defiance of a “fierce cat” to a trance-like state, intones this popular old immigrant song, 22 in response to Joey:

Venti giorni di barca a vapore/ E nel’America siamo rivati// Non abbiam trovato né paglia né fieno/ Abbiam dormito sul nudo terreno/ Come le bestie che va a riposà// E l’America l’è lunga l’è larga/ Circondata da fiumi e montagne. (BM 84)

Twenty days in a steamboat/ And in America we arrived// We found neither straw nor hay/ We slept on the naked land/ Like cattle going to rest// And America is long and wide/ Surrounded by rivers and mountains.

This song produces an emotional proximity that proves “too much” for the son: Joey cannot “bear the emotion she had shown him” and leaves the room where his mother bursts into sobs, hiding her face on the armrest. Singing, in a “dead sing-song voice,” is

135 the extreme attempt of the mother to reach out to her son and explain her story of migration to him. Joey‟s reaction shows that silence, the impossibility of communication by any means, is the final result of a generational gap in terms of cultural adaptation, a phenomenon not uncommon within migrant families and also evident in the distance separating Assunta from her daughter. Expressions such as: “stupida,” “ingrata,”

“vergogna,” “disgrazia,” “Mannaggia America,” voice the mother‟s frustration against the dominant culture, the “center” to which Marie is attracted. The insertion of the immigrant song, part of which is translated in the text, is interesting because it is the manifestation of an oral culture that does not articulate itself in standard Italian. Thus, to some extent, it remains silent (inaudible/unreadable) to the American/Canadian audience, and marginal with respect to “official” Italian culture. Yet, the song encompasses both

Italy and America through its representation of the migratory journey, so that it appears to voice resistance against both those cultures, which hold its orality and “distorted” language as marginal.

Assunta‟s alienation and her adoption of singing as a way to speak of the distress of migration remind us of the difficulty to articulate this experience, as also seen in Cagli

Seidenberg‟s works, and call to mind the question, notably posed by Spivak: “Can the

Subaltern Speak?” (1988). In light of Verdicchio‟s line of argument, such a question could be recast as “Can the Decontextualized Subaltern Write?” where the switch from

“speak” to “write” reflects the operation of “cultural translation” that the subaltern needs to perform in order to make her/his speech act comprehensible to external audiences

(Verdicchio 63-4). Although complex and imperfect, this transition must be recognized as a fundamental means of resisting silence and in its capacity to question binary

136 oppositions of oral and written culture that ascribe the former to the subaltern and the latter to dominant subjects.23 Through this operation, the memory of orality (e.g.,

Assunta‟s song) is retained in writing and we gain access to it, and briefly to the migratory history it contains, by an act of reading. As I suggested in the introduction of my project (see the section on de Certeau), a relic may sometimes represent a dead piece except outside itself, in the presence of the reader toward whom writing moves. In this specific instance, the page “serves” to host the song as a relic/place (i.e., a sign of stability/death, a verbal trace, for de Certeau) of which the reader is able to reactivate the original – oral – nature by reading it, but not its musical component, which is lost.

The intertwining of these two modes of communication, the oral and the written, is vital to many cultural works that recount the Italian emigration by “translating” the oral culture of immigrants into peculiar writing styles. Paci, for instance, performs this translation within the realm of fictional writing, which he describes as “literally becoming the characters and things you‟re writing about,” an act that allows to “see people and things more as they are” and that he inscribes within his goal of “serving” the migrant with humility (in Pivato, F. G. Paci 133). I would also suggest that the act of

“translation” has a strong metaphorical connotation in Italian Shoes. By evoking the image of something or somebody being “carried across” (or translatus, the Latin root of translation) a threshold by an agent/carrier, this act resembles that of the Roman citizens whom Mark tries to visualize as “carrying over” dead bodies into the catacombs . To some extent, Paci himself carries out this operation by bringing the stubborn relics of his own cultural background across the textual space, “the only way to keep things permanent” (interview, Pivato, F. G. Paci 142).

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The transition from oral to written mode in Italian Shoes reveals some important differences with respect to Black Madonna. Since it represents the journey of the

“decontextualized subaltern” Mark in Italy, English becomes the marginal language in this narrative scenario. The writer is thus constantly involved in the selection of the oral fragments to be recorded, which we can call “linguistic relics,” and the language(s) in which to import them onto the page. Dialogues held in Italian or marchigiano are usually conveyed either in English or in both languages, while original linguistic elements are retained when directly comprehensible to an Anglo reader (Che bella!, pasta asciuto

(sic), melanzane, paesan, professore, Divina Commedia, la patria, etc. ) or if they define a semantic field that the narrator wants to clarify and investigate. Words such as i campi, mezzadri, padrone, for instance, are employed to reveal forms of national subalternity that involve Mark‟s peasant relatives in Novilara and his own migrant parents: “He

[Nico] wanted to be a carabiniere. But his people were so poor…. They were mezzadri. It was a wheat farm. Gina will tell you when we visit her. She still has the mezzadria…”

“What does mezzadri mean?” ... “ „A family,‟ he said in English, „they have half. The padrone, the owner, has half. The land, the produce.‟” … “That was a difficult time, after the war, Marco” (38).

In Italian Shoes, furthermore, Paci uses language self-reflexively in order to reflect upon the process of writing about ordinary hard-working migrants. In his journal,

Mark jots down his travel impressions along with keeping an imaginary conversation with Ludwig Wittgenstein, a “literary godfather” with a personal experience of migration and displacement.

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Certain informed people had told me I didn‟t know how to use the English language properly, so I had gone to the best doctor there was. A Doctor of Language. The fact Wittgenstein was an Austrian, an immigrant … added to his stature in my eyes. His passion for truth and for precision of language was more than inspirational. (IS 8-9)

Precision of language is a characteristic of Paci‟s style that Caterina Edwards has compared to the quality of exactitude praised by Calvino as one of the six values of literature to be maintained in the new millennium (in Pivato, F. G. Paci 26). She has noted that this realistic style “does not draw attention to itself,”24 but by scrupulously reflecting things and characters of a specific microcosm, such as the West End, it denies the distance between reader and text. In Italian Shoes, precision of language is not simply shown but is reflected upon as part of a discourse on language largely based on

Wittgenstein‟s philosophical insights.

The main ideas that Mark learns from Wittgenstein are: 1. Language can become

“sick” when it loses its ordinary meaning in daily use: “[O]rdinary language was interwoven in how ordinary people lived” until religion, philosophy and poetry “changed words into vehicles for mythology and metaphor” according to their “agendas or language games,” so that “language became sick” (IS 39-40); and 2. “Every language is like an ancient city. At the centre a maze of little streets and squares, old and new houses.

Then additions…. One had to find one‟s way by trial and error. Go back to the maze at the centre where it all started. Then be able to get out. The fly out of the fly-bottle” (20).

At his arrival in Italy, Mark himself is “sick” (“Language on the printed page, black blood, had made me sick” 9), so, while exploring his cultural background, he also rediscovers language in its ordinary meaning, that is in its imbrications with orality and

139 people‟s everyday life. As I have mentioned, his trip ends in the catacombs, at “the very centre of the city” (182), where orality and writing, chants and graphic signs originally mingled in the ordinary life/death/new life rite of passage. Mark questions the notion of an authentic language, conceived outside of ordinary use. After his arrival in Novilara, he hears for the first time in his life children speaking Italian. Used to the voices of the migrant women shouting at each other in dialect in the Sault, these voices disorient him

(“I was paralyzed by a moment of being” 24). But they also make him wonder “what the

Doctor [Wittgenstein] would say about the dialetto. A ghetto language, probably. An anomaly. An offshoot trying to form its own roots, like the outgrowth on a potato” (24).

Mark‟s irony reveals that the concept of a “pure” language, abstractly opposed to a

“ghetto language,” is as illusory as that of the City of Language, which he imagines as

“open wooded parks filled with clear brooks and chirping birds” (25). And equally deceptive seems to be “the fly out of the fly-bottle” in that ordinary language is defined by the actual use of words and defines our historicity.

Notably, Wittgenstein‟s model of ordinary language, the same adopted in Italian

Shoes, provides a philosophical basis for a science of the ordinary in The Practice of

Everyday Life. De Certeau points out that by recognizing the fact of being “caught” in ordinary language and in the present of his historicity, Wittgenstein denies the philosopher a position of mastery over the analyzed “object,” a move that echoes Mark‟s repositioning from a dome/dominant to a grounded perspective on his cultural legacy. As such, philosophy cannot proceed as if it could “command a clear view” of the use of words. In the absence of privileged standpoints, truths are thus to be reduced to linguistic facts (or “documents”) “by criticism of the places of authority in which facts are

140 converted into truths” (11).25 Paci recognizes his own implication in the present of history when he states that “as you‟re writing the story of your parents you‟re also coming to terms with your background and defining yourself in an historical context” (in Pivato F.

G. Paci 133). This suggests a dialectics of “preservation” (meant to “serve”) and alteration that is congruent not only with what I have called Paci‟s mobilization of relics, but also with a notion of co-implication that I will further develop in the conclusion.

Moreover, it confirms Fischer‟s claim that “the search for a sense of ethnic identity is a

(re-)invention and discovery of a vision, both ethical and future-oriented” (196).

In Canada, this “search” is common to many writers of Italian background, but according to Susan Iannucci, Italian Canadian writing is “a fleeting phenomenon,” “the product of a moment in a writer‟s life…. Italy filters through in past tenses; their present is Canadian” (225-26). Verdicchio correctly observes that this conclusion is based on the identification of ethnicity or cultural identity with a specific set of themes, which could produce a double exclusion of a writer from both the “official” and “ethnic” categories

(120). Instead, warning against “determinative temptations,” he encourages us to see the

Italian Canadian group of writers as internally heterogeneous but engaged, as a whole, in the construction of “a new culture the form of which we cannot hope to know” (129). Nor can Iannucci‟s remark be valid in relation to Paci‟s writing: Italian Shoes and Black

Madonna show that the liminality resulting from the experience of migration can be explored from shifting perspectives over time and highlight new ways of re-tracing identity and articulating a voice. This, however, does not authorize a positive response to the question “Can the decontextualized subaltern speak?” but it rather poses a second, connected, question on who will listen to these voices, a question that I will address in the

141 conclusions through the concepts of co-implication and archive, within a future-oriented approach centered on liminality as a crossing space.

Notes

1. I use “more ordinary” with respect to the objective causes of migration and not as an attribute of the migrant subject that, as Sandro Mezzadra comments, should be considered in her/his individuality rather than as a “typical representative” of a culture, an ethnic group or community (Diritto di fuga 19).

2. See Bruno Ramirez, The Italians in Canada. In the 1950s, the influx of Italians to Canada reached unprecedented levels that made Italy the second largest source of Canadian immigration after Great Britain from 1948 to 1972. The number of Italian immigrants to Canada jumped from 3,898 during the 1931-1940 decade to 20,682 in the 1941-1950 period; it reached its peak in 1951-1960 with 250,812 units and fell drastically after 1967 when a new immigration policy was enacted (from 190,760 in 1961-1970 to 37,087 in 1971-1978) (Ramirez 7, table 1). On previous migrations from Italy, Italian laborers, and the formation of Little Italies, see Robert F. Harney, Dalla Frontiera alle Little Italies. Focusing on Italian settlements in Toronto, Harvey combined multiple approaches, including Hayden White‟s historiography and Italo Calvino‟s novels, as suggested by the title of one of his essays, “If One Were to Write a History of Postwar Toronto Italia,” contained in the posthumous collection From the Shores of Hardship, edited by Nicholas De Maria Harney, 75-103. For Italian literary works on Canada, see Sanfilippo, “Images of Canadian Cities in Italy: Then and Now.” Other historical overviews of the Italian migration to Canada can be found in Zucchi; Jansen; Martellini, in Bevilacqua, De Clementi, and Franzina Vol. I Partenze, 369-84; and in the same series, Ramirez, in Bevilacqua, De Clementi, and Franzina Vol. II Arrivi 89-96. Related ethnographic and literary topics are dealt with in Perin and Sturino. On the transition of Southern Italian men and women from rural villages and peasant culture to the factories of Montreal in the 1950s, see Giovanni Princigalli‟s recent documentary I got up my courage [Ho fatto il mio coraggio] (2009).

3. It is commonly accepted that this literature was officially inaugurated with the publication of Di Cicco‟s Roman Candles: An Anthology of Poems by Seventeen Italo-Canadian Poets (1978). A number of collective works have thereafter appeared, such as: Pivato, The Anthology of Italian-Canadian Writing (1998) and Loriggio, L’altra storia: antologia della letteratura italo-canadese (1998).

4. In F. G. Paci: Essays on His Works (2003), editor Joseph Pivato argues that Black Madonna is still studied in Canadian college and university courses possibly because it “portrays the most graphic and powerful image of ethnic self-hatred [Marie‟s] to be found in North American literature” (12). For a psychological reading of the mother-daughter relationship in the novel, see Roberta Sciff-Zamaro, “Black Madonna: A Search for the Great Mother,” Contrasts, ed. J. Pivato, 77-100.

5. About emigration and death/mourning, see also Sebastiano Martelli, “America, emigrazione e „follia‟ nell‟opera di Pirandello.”

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6. In his analysis of the role of the Italies outside of Italy, Loriggio states: “Only when Italian élites have understood this, when they have gone through their own necessary ritual of familial recognition, only when they have demonstrated that they can perceive their migrant relatives as new historical subjects with their specific psycho-socio-anthro-ontological baggage, will they – politicians or intellectuals – have engaged the globalized era that their country has entered” (“Italian Migration outside Europe” 27, italics mine).

7. Ramirez recalls that the possession of a house - the measure par excellence of the migrant‟s “ancestral desire” for material and psychological stability - after World War II became “part of the Italian migration folklore” through a popular song that spoke of “a little house in Canada which had a pool with fish inside, was surrounded by lots of lily flowers, and was admired by passers-by” (Italians 14).

8. The analysis of food habits among Italian migrants has become a valid methodological tool to investigate popular cultures and ethnic identities outside of Italy. See, for instance, Teti, “Emigrazione, alimentazione, culture popolari” in Bevilacqua, De Clementi, and Franzina, Vol. I Partenze, 575-97; Cinotto, Una famiglia che mangia insieme: cibo ed etnicità nella comunità italoamericana di New York, 1920-1940; Paolini, Seppilli, and Sorbini, Migrazioni e culture alimentari; and La Cecla, Pasta and pizza.

9. For a closer analysis of these ironic changes, see Marino Tuzi, “Provisionality, Multiplicity, and the Ironies of Identity in Black Madonna,” in Pivato, F. G. Paci 69-106.

10. On the two novels, see Caterina Edwards, “The Confessions of Mark Trecroci: Style in Frank Paci‟s Black Blood and Under the Bridge,” in Pivato, F. G. Paci 19-27.

11. Another leading poet and novelist, Mary Di Michele, born in Lanciano in 1949 and emigrated to Canada as a child, recalls of her trip to Italy in 1972: “Italian identity started to come out more and more. By the end of the summer I started to dream in Italian” (qtd. in Pivato, F. G. Paci 13).

12. On the mezzadria system in post-Fascist central Italy, see Victoria Belco, “Sharecroppers, War, and Social Change in Central Italy,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 12.4 (2007): 397-405.

13. Robert Viscusi makes a similar point in Buried Caesars and Other Secrets of Italian American Writing, where he claims that many of the beliefs and impossible ideals buried in Italian American writing originated in the relationship that Italians have with the dead: “In Italy, people do not worship the dead, but they consult with them…. Italians learn from the dead. This process is basic to the way that Italians reinvent themselves, century after century. They follow the sun that emerges from the underworld” (6).

14. On religious imagery in Paci, see Anna Carlevaris, “„The Most Sacred and Secret Things of Life,‟” in Pivato, F. G. Paci 59-68.

15. The story of the miracle of Marcellino feeding and talking to Jesus Christ, which Paci occasionally recalls, became also very popular in Italy thanks to the success of Ladislao Vajda‟s film Marcelino pan y vino (1955). On the influence of cinema, see also Frank Paci, “Growing Up with the Movies,” in Pivato, The Anthology of Italian-Canadian Writing 260-70.

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16. For a strong case of emigration and immigration as inseparable aspects of a single phenomenon, see Sayad, The Suffering of the Immigrant.

17. Guha, “Chandra‟s Death,” Subaltern Studies V, 138, qtd. in Highmore 96. On the same page, Highmore reports the classic formulation of “history from below” contained in E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963, 12): “I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the luddite cropper, the „obsolete‟ hand-loom weaver, the „utopian‟ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.”

18. Verdicchio defines the historical relationship of the Italian South to the North as “colonial in character” on the basis of Italy‟s unification by Piedmontese forces in the 1860s. Since “[e]migration is part and parcel of the oppressive process of nation building,” he sees the Southern emigrant as being a “decontextualized subaltern.” Verdicchio uses “subaltern” in a Gramscian sense, in which “the classes so described are prehegemonic and not unified” (see 175 n.4) and offers the Association of Italian Canadian Writers as a pertinent example. As I underlined above, Paci‟s main characters come from areas that today we identify with central Italy, but they are depicted as southerners for their peasant background; as such, they are connoted by a double liminality in the external perception, both inside and outside the national borders.

19. For comparative views of multiculturalism, see Sneja Gunew, “Multicultural Multiplicities: Canada, U.S.A. and Australia,” in Loriggio, Social Pluralism 29-47; and the two essays by Bruno Ramirez, “Multiculturalism, Immigration and Ethnic Relations: Canada and the USA Compared,” Multiculturalism and the History of International Relations from the 18th Century to the Present, ed. Savard and Vigezzi, 280-96 and “Canada, Immigration, and Multiculturalism: Genesis of a Policy, 1950-1971,” Europe, its Borders, and the Others, ed. Tosi, 141-64.

20. Among those who have chosen to adopt Italian as a literary language after they moved outside of Italy: Dino Fruchi, Romano Perticarini, Aldo Gioseffini and Maria J. Ardizzi. Italian Canadian writing manifests itself in multiple languages (and dialects) but from an institutional viewpoint remains in a marginal position as most of its authors are excluded from Italian Studies curricula, as Joseph Pivato observes in “Italianistica Versus Italian-Canadian Writing,” in Loriggio, Social Pluralism 227-47.

21. For Deleuze and Guattari, “[A] minor literature doesn‟t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language. But the first characteristic of minor literature in any case is that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization” (16). Other characteristics of minor literatures are that “everything in them is political” and “everything takes on a collective value” (17). Drawing on these notions, Verdicchio sees Italian Canadian writing as a “site of reterritorialization tending toward the formation of a historic bloc” in spite of the diversity of its writers (Bound, 118). From a different perspective, a “minor literature” is currently taking shape in Italy, where (im)migrant writers often adopt Italian to address interethnic and intercultural issues and to contest rigid definitions of italianità. See Graziella Parati, Migration Italy: The Art of Talking Back in a Destination Culture.

22. On this topic, see Maria Rosaria Ostuni, and Gian Antonio Stella. Sogni e fagotti: immagini, parole e canti degli emigranti italiani.

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23. For Gramscian scholars such as Verdicchio (Bound, 66) and Epifanio San Juan Jr. (“Antonio Gramsci‟s Theory of the „National-popular‟ and Socialist Revolution in the Philippines,” Perspectives on Gramsci, ed., Joseph Francese, 163-85), the fixed opposition between elite and subaltern (specifically, peasantry) postulated by Subaltern Studies historians and Spivak represents a methodological limit that undermines any emancipatory project for the subalterns. The latter are in fact made speechless not only because of their hopeless manipulation by dominant groups but because, as a “pure” manifestation of an oral culture, they must not speak in order to remain “genuine” and thus cannot be spoken for (as writing would contaminate their oral expression).

24. Paci used almost identical words to answer a question by Pivato about the “plain” writing style that he used in Italian Shoes (Pivato, F. G. Paci, 143).

25. See de Certeau, chapter 1, 8-14.

CHAPTER 3

Embodying Liminality: Southern Diasporas and Racial Boundaries in Kym

Ragusa’s The Skin Between Us

In this chapter, I propose to investigate Italian identity through racial liminality, a form of in-betweenness primarily inscribed in the body, and often a source of vulnerability, but also a conceptual tool that enables to deconstruct, from within, the categories of blackness and whiteness and the North/South dualism.

The divide between North and South, commonly known with Gramsci‟s expression “The Southern Question,” has characterized the debate on Italian national identity ever since Italy‟s Unification.1 While in the early 1860s the North embodied a model of development that fit the new nation‟s aspiration to become a modern European country, Southern Italy, or meridione, posed a major challenge to this ambition, appearing as a picturesque but underdeveloped territory populated by backward and superstitious people.2 A series of socio-economic, political and ethnographic reports paved the way to the reifying dichotomy of North versus South, supporting the absolute and inherently unchangeable otherness of the South. The works of positivist anthropologists Lombroso, Niceforo, Sergi, and others, soon provided allegedly

“scientific” proof to meridionalismo (a set of perceptions and discourses on the Southern

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146 difference), giving a fundamental contribution to the fabrication of Southern populations as racially inferior.3 In the essay The Southern Question (written in 1926 and published in

1930), Antonio Gramsci denounced the racial biases that this “southernist” literature disseminated in the masses of the North by giving credit to the notion that “[t]he South is the ball and chain that prevents a more rapid progress in the civil development of Italy;

Southerners are biologically inferior beings” (20).

The effects of such anthropological views were widespread and long-lasting in the

Italian peninsula as well as abroad. The systematic inclusion of racial difference in Italian social sciences and humanities marked the “multidisciplinary expansion” of meridionalismo into a broadly cultural Southernism that in defining “a cluster of essentialist value judgments” (Bertellini, Italy 70) supplied the aesthetic construction of the Italian South as an “internal” Other (Schneider). In contrast to Said‟s Orientalism,

“the South emerged as a liminal space at the borders of Italy‟s hegemonic identity representations; a despised alter ego with a different racial make-up, religious customs, and emotional regimes, yet still within the nation‟s cultural geography” (Bertellini, Italy

71).4 And in a new form, southernist racism assumed a regulatory function of the migratory fluxes from South to North during the modernization processes of the 1960s

(Mezzadra, Condizione 95). But the reification of the Southern otherness in racial terms, as elaborated in Italy, also crossed the ocean thanks to the prompt translations of Italian positivists‟ works. These found favorable ground in the American culture of the turn of the century, raising doubts on the “whiteness” of Southern Italians and justifying racial prejudice against them at a time of massive migrations from Europe.5 The racial positioning of Italians, as one ethnic group, has over time shifted towards “whiteness”

147 within a nation where the white/black paradigm is deep-rooted (Guglielmo and Salerno;

Roediger). Such a dichotomy, like the North vs. South or the “West and the rest” constructs, offers an oversimplified view of complex phenomena that in the U.S. have been explored in historical and sociological terms as well as in cinematic works such as

Spike Lee‟s Jungle Fever and Do The Right Thing.

Racial liminality, as the title suggests, lies at the core of Kym Ragusa‟s The Skin

Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging (2006), which cuts across the polarizations recalled above locating itself “between two worlds,” the category for which

Ragusa was awarded the 2009 John Fante Prize.6 While many Italian American writers have adopted the memoir, and among them many women (see Romeo), most notably

Louise DeSalvo‟s Vertigo, Ragusa‟s use of this genre is innovative for the issues that it tackles and its critical self-consciousness. Written from a biracial authorial perspective, this text focuses on boundaries and conflicts between two communities (Southern Italian

American and African American) conceived as sharing Mediterranean origins and brought together in the city of New York by processes of voluntary and forced migration.

Relying also on historical sources, I will first concentrate on the textual construction of racial and geographical boundaries to highlight the personal and public layers of meaning embedded in Ragusa‟s memoir and their relation to the formation of a “white” Italian identity in the US. Then, turning the attention to the journey to Sicily that frames the memoir, I will discuss the author‟s attempt to connect past and present Southern diasporas from/to Italy, and show how her transnational project meets and deviates from sociologist Franco Cassano‟s figuration of the South.

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In the context of my dissertation, the present chapter represents a transition to a more direct way of addressing Italian national identity through both emigration and immigration, a link that will be further developed in the last chapter through the film

Lamerica. From a predominantly individual and familial sense of Italianness and liminality, as expressed in Seidenberg‟s and Paci‟s works, I will now move to underscore interethnic/interracial relationships between not only individuals but also communities.

Furthermore, albeit its literary form, The Skin Between Us bridges the novels analyzed in the first chapters to Amelio‟s film by adopting the memoir as a medium of exploration of issues (e.g., race, gender and cultural affiliations) that Ragusa previously approached through film making.

3.1 SOUTHERN ENCOUNTERS IN THE CITY: NEGOTIATING DISTANCE

In the introduction to her seminal work The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by

Italian American Women (1985), Helen Barolini points out that economic factors and traditionalist views of education and family have led to the literary silence of women of

Italian descent. The Dream Book has addressed this silence by collecting the voices of fifty-six authors of memoirs, nonfiction, fiction, drama, and poetry, thus becoming a landmark for later scholars in the field (De Salvo and Giunta; Giunta; Bona 1994 and

1999). Engaged in a process of self-redefinition while holding on to tradition, Italian

American women, according to Barolini,

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are writing to create models that were never there; they are writing to know themselves. They are emerging, not receding, writers. Italian American writers are recombining two cultures into something which is of neither one world nor another, but, belonging to both, forms a third realm of consciousness and expression. These new women identify their Italian background and American foreground, thereby doubling their perceptions. There is an Italian American identity because they have an awareness of it, and this has brought very definite emotional overtones into their work. (34-5)

Born to an Italian American father with Sicilian and Calabrian ancestors, and an

African American mother with a mixed-race heritage, Ragusa‟s “third realm of consciousness and expression” is more complex than the one defining Italian American culture for Barolini, as it emerges from the conjunction of multiple marginal positions. In unveiling her project of ethnic recovery, Barolini herself draws the connection between

Italian American women and other ethnic groups, in particular, black women writers. In her anthology, she in fact paraphrases Zora Neale Hurston, recalls Alice Walker‟s search for her silenced voice, and claims that “of all the American models available, it is probably to the Black woman writer that the Italian American woman can feel most affinity” (33). Barolini underscores gender affiliations not just across interethnic relationships but within family genealogies, as powerfully shown in her novel Umbertina

(1979). In the introduction of The Dream Book, she encourages women to “use the same strength our grandmothers had” (51), and to view them as figures of access to the ethnic past and valuable sources of artistic inspiration. These two kinds of affiliations are highlighted because The Skin Between Us (SBU) revolves precisely around the distance separating the narrator from her beloved and strong-willed grandmothers, Gilda and

Miriam, and these between each other. “To negotiate the distance” (19) between the two worlds that they represent, the Italian American and the African American, respectively,

150 is Ragusa‟s ambitious goal, toward which she moves by first locating the sites of difference and measuring the extent of such distances.

Organized in nine chapters enclosed between a Prologue and an Epilogue, the memoir‟s first chapter opens with a photograph of Kym sitting at a dining room table with Gilda and Miriam: “I only have one photograph of myself with my two grandmothers. The picture was taken on Thanksgiving in 1996. In another year, they would both be gone” (SBU 21). “[G]rown close, if you could call it that” towards the end of their lives, when they were both ill, Gilda and Miriam have rarely shared a meal together: “I was the sole connection between them, the conduit through which they found a way to talk to each other, to respect each other” (22). If memory is defective, the photograph provides “the only proof” that this encounter was real, that “it was not something I merely wished for, a dream of wholeness that could revoke all the separations, all the silences and anger that filled so much of our lives together” (22). A detailed description of the picture follows, with its subjects, their poses and features, reminding us of Ragusa‟s filmmaker‟s eye and of the lyrical and intimate prose whereby she translates her acts of reminiscing into storytelling:

The window behind us frames us, the night outside is thick and black. We are like a still life, the objects on the table, the angle and warmth of the light. The three of us suspended in time, a study in composition. How did we get here, sitting together, sharing a meal? Two warring communities, two angry and suspicious families, two women tugging at my heart, pulling me in different directions. (25)

At this point, Ragusa wraps up the description of the photograph by bringing into focus its core element, the skin:

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We have almost the same color skin. Our skin is the truth that this image has captured. Gilda‟s thin, wrinkled skin like paper left out in the sun, Miriam‟s plump, barely lined, mine always a mark of difference, even here, even though it‟s not all that different. Three variations on ivory, yellow, olive, refracted between us like a kaleidoscope. The skin between us: a border, a map, a blank page. History and biology. The skin between us that kept us apart, and sheltered us against the hurt we inflicted on each other. The skin between us: membrane, veil, mirror. A shared skin. There were storms behind us and there would be darkness ahead of us, but in the photograph all that is held at bay. (25)

The skin is the focus of Ragusa‟s critical lens, as around this site personal and social tensions frequently grow and burst into racial violence. Edvige Giunta has pointed out that in Ragusa‟s work “race does not solidify as a physical reality. It takes shape as a constellation of exploratory moments, all interconnected, all equally elusive” (“Figuring

Race” 226). The investigation of boundaries carried out in the films Passing (1996) and fuori/outside (1997, see note 6) continues more extensively and with a wider scope in the memoir The Skin Between Us. The physical reality of skin, with its troubling shades of color, is the ground where boundaries are first drawn, where the biological element, a single variation of color, has been historically and culturally appropriated to produce an indelible “mark of difference.”

In an essay on the politics of representation recalled in the first chapter, Trinh T.

Minh-ha notes that “[f]rom one category, one label, to another, the only way to survive is to refuse. Refuse to become an integratable element,” or on the contrary, a refuse (as a noun), by first of all refusing the naming process (6). Specifically addressing “indefinite unsettlement” as “the refugee‟s mode of survival” (4), Minh-ha‟s words bring to mind

Ebe Cagli Seidenberg‟s self-definition of “hybrid” and her rejection to be simply labeled

152 as refused or integrated, as refugee or voluntary migrant or tourist, Italian or American or

Jew. Curiously, both Ebe in Il Tempo dei Dioscuri and Kym in the memoir choose images rather than words to express their in-between positioning: whereas Lo Sgombero stands precariously on the threshold between inside and outside, past and future, Kym conveys the idea of a threshold through skin, in a comparative “study in composition” of female bodies. The skin here functions as a photograph, in the above sense of “proof” of a reality to look closely into, while also pointing to the reflective role of photographs within the memoir that allows to produce poetic images “beyond what the image offers to the sight” (Antonucci 111).

Constantly eliciting the narrator‟s memory and imagination, photographs firmly sustain her effort to uncover hidden family stories and untangle collective histories, along with family storytelling and memories, census records, birth certificates and obituaries that Ragusa carefully interweaves into the textual arena of memory. The narrator oversees the combination of these oral, written, and visual sources, filling the gaps with her own imagination and at times questioning the reliability of her own memory: “I try to picture,” “I imagine,” “I like to think,” “Here is where my memory gets tangled,” “But this is my adult memory speaking … my vision narrowed by grown-up resentment,”

“I‟ve forgotten everything that happened after that day,” “Now it lives only in my mind, the memory fading,” “filling the space where my memory falters out of fear, confusion, shame,” and so forth. From the interplay of these elements emerges a critical and creative reconstruction of the past that ties the private sphere, which a memoir may suggest to enlighten, into a broader vision of race and belonging that aims at undoing traditional notions of borders. The skin is the space “between us,” a site that Kym at once configures

153 as a border, a distancing element, and a porous surface, a membrane that instead facilitates contact and exchange. From and through this space she articulates her politics of representation, based on the refuse of partaking in the consolidation of racial boundaries within and between cultures. In Borderlands/La Frontera, an essential contribution to border writing, Chicana author Gloria Anzaldúa states: “To survive the

Borderlands/you must live sin fronteras/be a crossroads” (195).

As Minh-ha suggests, in contexts of ethnic discrimination, “the re-appropriation of a negative label as an oppositional stance in cultural politics often functions as a means both to remind and to get rid of the label‟s derogatory connotations,” a question that reconnects to Bertellini‟s exploration of the receptive process of Southernism by

Southern Italian culture (see note 4). New and old meanings “graft onto each other” displacing rather than denying “the traces of previous graftings” (Minh-ha 7). For

Ragusa, such an accumulation of labels, including “traces” of negative connotations, provides an unsettling response to the question (possibly posed by the reader): “What are you? Black and Italian. African American, Italian American. American. Other. Biracial,

Interracial. Mixed-blood, Half-Breed, High-Yellow, Redbone, Mulatta. Nigger, Dago,

Guinea” (SBU 25). To reply to the next question, “Where are you from?,” Kym extends the ambiguous nature of borders imprinted on her body onto the surrounding extracorporeal reality:

I was made in Harlem. Its topography is mapped on my body: the borderlines between neighborhoods marked by streets that were forbidden to cross, the borderlines enforced by fear and anger, and transgressed by desire. The streets crossing east to west, north to south, like the web of veins beneath my skin. (SBU 26)

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This passage, as the one discussed above, deals with material and mental borders within family and neighborhood, spaces that in Ragusa‟s journey are inextricably interconnected. Here she uses the body to map a geography of distance and trespassing that forms the background for her parents‟ relationship. Her mother, the embodiment of beauty, is “exotic in the white, upper-class world” of Columbia University, where she works as a secretary and her father is a clerk in accounting. In this “white” space, the two meet in 1964 and out of an “exotic” interest for each other - “He [as an Italian] was exotic to her as she was to him” (28) - they start dating in secret, in a social scene “still resolutely segregated” even in New York City. Racial tensions resonate in the comments and attitudes of black and white people alike. In Harlem, “black men would sometimes threaten my father, and yell at my mother, „What’s the matter, you too good for a black man?‟” while white men “would spit at them” when seeing them walk together downtown. In both parts of town, women “shook their heads at them in disgust” (28). The hostile climate of the streets also reverberates inside the respective households. The shades of color may not be very different for the light-skinned Miriam and the Southern

Italian Gilda, but the awareness of the stakes enclosed in the U.S. color line is a powerful source of opposition between them. Gilda feels ashamed at the idea that “the whole neighborhood [the Bronx] knew by now that my father brought a nigger, a moulignan’, into his house;” while her husband, Luigi, philosophically thinks (or is it Ragusa‟s gendering imagination at work?): “His son was an American, after all, and a man. Let him have a little fun” (30). On the other hand, Miriam does not seem enthusiastic either about this pairing: “If my mother was going to aim for a white man, why not something

155 better? My father was barely white” (29). In her eyes, he is “poor white trash,” and she later blames him and “those damned Sicilians with their African blood” (56, emphasis mine) for Kym‟s tightly curly hair.

Whereas in Paci‟s Black Madonna the focus is on the generational conflicts resulting from two competing factors, the Italian traditions imported into the West End and the dominant Canadian culture, Ragusa‟s relationalities are more complex in that she links, horizontally,7 two minority groups and cultures, one of which, the Southern Italian

American, is described in the process of fleeing its marginal status. To properly understand the reasons behind the racial remarks above, the comments must be examined in the specific context of New York‟s Harlem. The presence of Italian immigrants in the northeast section of Manhattan dates back to the 1870s and, by the mid 1920s, this area,

East Harlem, was already known as Italian Harlem (Orsi 319-22). Its territory was not separated from West Harlem or Black Harlem by actual borders, but Italians, African

Americans, and other ethnic groups that moved in later on, recognized which sections they would “fit in” and which ones they had to keep away from. The proximity of the

Italian immigrants, who were predominantly southerners, to dark-skinned people was not only geographical, but also imagined, as the former have been connected with the latter

“for the length of their history in this country” (Orsi 317). As the Italians learned how race is socially constructed in the American landscape, and realized that success in the new environment could not be divorced from whiteness, they started a struggle to escape the “dilemma of inbetweenness”8 that entangled them across the country by differentiating themselves from other groups with darker skin.

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Through this “strategy of alterity” or “Harlem strategy,” as Orsi calls it, many groups tried to define themselves against a racial other since the 1930s. Marking out the borders, even when they were not materially there, became a crucial element of the racial and cultural process of differentiation between the newly forged identity of Italian

Americans and other ethnic selves. This strategy intensified hostilities between African and Italian Americans, as the latter also attempted to erase their history and geography of proximity to the former by leaving East Harlem for better housing in the suburbs in the

1940s and 1950s. For many, moving out of the inner city, away from the dark-skinned other, carried a strong symbolic meaning in that it signified moving up toward whiteness and its many privileges. The “desperate desire” to escape their own class and race oppression in the U.S. brought the Italian Americans to develop a “consciousness of whiteness” and eventually stand “for the very image of white ethnic working-class right- wing conservativism” (Guglielmo and Salerno 4).9

This brief account of the evolution of border-making in Harlem provides the geo- cultural background in which several elements of Ragusa‟s text can be inscribed: the opposing views of Miriam and Gilda on each other‟s community; the racial comments made by local people whenever borders are crossed; the tactics implemented to make seem safe places that in reality allow for risky circumstances (as illustrated, for instance, by Miriam‟s acting out a “quasi-British accent” and “the bargaining power of her light skin” to convince white taxi drivers to take her home to Harlem). And finally, Kym‟s own Italian family‟s “white flight” from East Harlem to the Bronx (early 1950s) and eventually to New Jersey (in 1975), which Ragusa elsewhere defines as “the culmination of an escape from the desperate poverty of southern Italy. It was the last leg in a series of

157 migrations – from Italy to America, from immigrant slum to ethnic neighborhood …. to the outlying suburbs [which]…. became a place of forgetting, of leaving history behind”

(in Guglielmo and Salerno 218-19).

The passages of the memoir quoted above, with their peculiar blend of geographical and corporeal language and their insistence on “map,” “border,” “skin,” and other related words, hint at where the narrator positions herself and how she articulates her discourse on race and belonging. I will first consider how Ragusa constructs self- positioning in the text, since her attempt at undoing borders and negotiating distances through writing is primarily rooted in her consciousness of in-betweenness as a potential space of personal freedom. A consciousness that Kym slowly develops between her childhood and adolescence (a span of time that the writer details more extensively than the latter years of her life), allowing her to counterbalance the sense of vulnerability imposed on her because of her skin color. Like Ebe, she perceives liminality as an uncomfortable position: “My skin only caused trouble – it was always too light or too dark, always a problem” (109). She may have “escaped classification” at birth - she tells at the end of the first chapter - at least on paper, since her birth certificate bears no indication of race (although, as an adult, she finds out that her father first introduced her into his family as Carmen‟s - his Puerto Rican wife - niece, an early clue of her outsider collocation within that family). And, in chapter two, we read that as a child she thought that she could “grow into” a pink-skinned person, like the plastic ballerina she is fond of or the “almost pink” Gilda, her main caretaker after the early separation of her parents.

However, growing up between two families, two homes, and the two neighborhoods of Harlem and the Bronx, she not only learns the language of the black

158 female body, but also the risks associated with it. In Harlem, Miriam does not allow her to cross the street by herself for fear of violence, while in the Bronx she can join the

Italian American and Italian Irish neighborhood kids only by passing for white, as one episode recounts at the end of chapter seven. During a handball game, one of the boys shouts: “Hey, I think there’s a nigger here!” causing the attention of the other kids and

Kym‟s desire to escape from her own body. Her cousin Marie can only protect Kym from being beaten up by claiming her family affiliation and denying her racial identity: “She’s not a nigger … She’s my cousin, Kym. It’s just dark outside” (179). On the contrary, the awareness of blackness and femaleness is de-emphasized in the recreational moment that

Kym juxtaposes right after. The engagement of bodies while playing King of the

Mountain with the children of a large Sicilian family of the Bronx is depicted as liberating: “Rolling in the dirt, getting knocked in the eye by someone‟s elbow … - I was very much in my body, banged and bruised, but at the same time I felt an exhilarating freedom from it. It was as if I could forget my difference – the way it insisted itself and was insisted upon – and just be a body among other bodies” (181). Kym associates this unconsciousness of skin color with the sense of inclusion that the Sicilian family offers her, probably out of a shared feeling of otherness vis-à-vis the community due to skin color. In fact, the members of that family are tagged as “Siggie”- dark in the neighborhood, “meaning Sicilian” (179).

A further stage in Kym‟s consciousness of racial boundaries, as tied to body and territory at once, occurs when she is nine, while moving to Maplewood, New Jersey.

Gang violence in the Bronx and an act of robbery at gunpoint on the stairs leading to

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Miriam‟s apartment in Harlem prompt her Italian American family to leave the city for the suburbs. In chapter eight, she writes:

I remember noticing the dividing line in the middle of the [Lincoln] tunnel – on one side in bold white letters it said New York, on the other, New Jersey – I couldn‟t figure out how they could divide the river in half. We emerged from the tunnel that day part of the middle class, on our way to living the American Dream. A house in the suburbs, two cars, a garage, and a backyard. I, too, emerged as something new: Kym Ragusa. Not exactly a black girl, not exactly an Italian girl. I didn‟t know the term “white flight” until I was an adult, but here I was, incongruously enough, part of the white ethnic exodus from the city. (185)

The act of emerging from a tunnel that interrupts the fluid space of the river, marking an artificial division between here and there, evokes the arbitrariness implied in the baptism into whiteness and middle class that the image conveys. As a matter of fact, what seems to suggest the last successful stage of an epic journey of whitening and social mobility, as implied by Orsi‟s “Harlem strategy,” only preludes to the ordeals that test the family in the rest of the chapter, which rather evokes de Certeau‟s concept of “tactic.”

For Kym‟s father, a Vietnam War veteran, heroin becomes “an escape from his suburban escape” (205); his relationship with Carmen, who is never truly accepted in the family, ends; he cannot keep his cook job at the same restaurant for long periods; and he comes close to killing his father during a fight, after which Kym is sent back to New York.

Besides, when Carmen leaves, the economic situation is such that even Gilda has to start working on weekends, cleaning the houses of the rich people living in the wealthy part of town. Throughout the three years spent in Maplewood, Kym‟s position within her Italian

American family seems to remain uncertain, marked, as she puts it, by her “anxiety about belonging” (188), without being able to ever feel genuinely included. It is difficult for her

160 to catch up with “an entire lifetime of jokes, games, secrets, and tears” (214) that Aunt

Angela, Gilda, and Marie share among them, and especially to conquer her grandmother‟s unconditioned love: “There was a certain distance between Gilda and me that never seemed to close, an imperceptible formality that I could sense but never quite name or understand” (213). At one point, the fear of not belonging that Gilda appears to conjure up in Kym, brings the latter to yell at her: “I think you hate me” (214). Kym has dreams of being insulted and called “nigger” by the neighborhood kids, and remembers, possibly with her imagination, a girl talking of “how to put razors in apples for niggers” at a Halloween party (197). But her not-too-dark complexion, newly straightened hair, and Italian last name apparently make her difference pass as unnoticed, marking at the same time “the beginning of many years of silence, of averting my eyes, of receding further and further into myself where there was nothing to explain, nothing to risk” (199).

Kym‟s retreat into invisibility stops during her adolescence, when she finds a new comfortable home in music. In the ninth and final chapter, she speaks of the influence of

Poly Styrene, the lead singer of a punk band with whom she identified: “She was biracial like me, with the same springy corkscrew hair and the same in-between skin.” Her songs about the “feeling of freakishness and ugliness” of people belonging nowhere, according to common classifications, resonate with Kym as they defy victimization with boldness:

“With my dyed hair, my thrift-shop dresses and combat boots, and the safety pins in my ears, I found a way to feel comfortable in my own skin. To stand out because I wanted to, to highlight my difference instead of trying to fade into the background, gave me a freedom I had never known” (221). This new consciousness arouses a personal, autonomous, perspective on racial issues, especially concerning Italian Americans and

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African Americans, as reflected in Kym‟s comments on Yusef Hawkins‟s 1989 murder in

Bensonhurst and the violence of Italian Americans against their “perceived enemies:”

“This was the story of my father‟s family and my mother‟s family writ large, and in blood. The policed borders of the body and the community, the illicit desire, the ancient rules broken and the brutal consequences of such transgressions. It was my story, but I survived it” (224). The last chapter spans over two decades, concluding with Kym shooting a documentary about her father cooking baked ziti in the kitchen (“where his power is” 228, an expression reminiscent of Paci‟s description of the dinner table as

Assunta‟s “theatre of operations”), and a series of deaths in the family, including

Miriam‟s and Gilda‟s, which eventually lead to Kym‟s trip to Sicily that frames the memoir.

Ragusa‟s reconstruction of her literary persona shows that the embodiment of racial liminality can produce a sense of vulnerability connected with the “anxiety about belonging” and the associated fear of exclusion (or semi-acceptance) even within one‟s own family. Although uncomfortable, her in-between space also inscribes the possibility of freedom when highlighting difference becomes a choice rather than an act of marking imposed from the outside. The scope of such positioning evidently exceeds the personal experience of the narrator insofar as Ragusa, as a biracial woman and artist, embraces in- betweenness in her memoir to lay out politics of representation based on the “refuse” of conventional dichotomies and the search for cultural connections. Since her immediate objective is “to negotiate the distance” between her grandmothers and, in general, the two sides of her family, the latter constitute the fundamental terrain of her exploration and search for cultural connections. A peculiar approach in some ways, in that she examines

162 race and borders not primarily vis-à-vis the dominant American culture but, as I suggested, transnationally and horizontally, within and across two diasporic groups both depicted as marginal. For Ragusa, the negotiation process includes both questioning consolidated boundaries and envisioning grounds for communication. She tackles this challenge by resorting to three operations, namely contesting, disordering, and connecting, which I will briefly outline.

By contesting I refer here to Ragusa‟s ability to expose the fallacy of certain notions and perceptions of race and space. Besides bringing to the fore the social and geographical constructedness of the Southern Italian whiteness in the period between the

1950s-70s, Ragusa deconstructs the black/white paradigm through the complex genealogy of her mother‟s family. Reconnecting the memories of Miriam, her mother

Mae and her sisters from Pittsburgh with photographs and official documents, Ragusa draws a history of miscegenation that repeats itself for over five generations, from

Sybela, the first known ancestor, enslaved on a plantation in Maryland in the mid-1800s, to Kym‟s mother. It is a history that speaks of an entangled racial and ethnic background

(with forebears of African, German, Native American, and Chinese descent), of crossings that generate “hybrids, shapeshifters, tresspassers” (SBU 73). Within it, men appear occasionally, in conjunction with rapes and positions of power, whereas Ragusa claims her filial relationship to the women of the family, who “were the embodiment of the margins, of the in-between space that I, too, would inhabit” (67). Although recalling that black women‟s work and solidarity sustained a “whole underground economy” in

Miriam‟s neighborhood (35-6), Ragusa stresses the disparities and incongruities associated with skin color in her maternal family. For instance, she believes that her

163 great-grandmother Mae‟s wild behavior (“[s]he danced and drank and swore like a sailor”) was probably conceived in her pale family as related to her darkness, “as if her visible African blood were … the cause of her moral lapses” (68). The author opposes this all-too-familiar and enduring stereotype with the idea of an “emotional exile” that separated Mae from her golden sisters, growing into rebellion and making her become

“the very thing that her skin was supposed to determine” (68). Furthermore, Ragusa illustrates the fluctuating connotations of blackness through the notion of “passing for white.”10 In the memoir, there is a direct reference to a story (told in the video Passing) about an incident that occurred to Miriam in a “whites only” restaurant during the 1950s in North Carolina, in which, risking her life, she claims her blackness after passing for white (197-8). The pride she takes in her heritage similarly shows in her political activism and passionate work in Harlem housing development during the 1970s. Ragusa observes that Miriam resolutely rejects passing, and yet, as I mentioned above, she resorts to it on occasion, and justifies it as a “temporary economic strategy” that the black community “understood and tolerated” (68).

Another topic subjected to scrutiny and contestation regards the perception of space within the Italian American community. Ragusa‟s account of her paternal ancestors, also focusing on women and their marginality, exemplifies Gabaccia‟s notion of diasporas as “webs of social connections” that linked local villages and regions (rather than the Italian nation as a whole) to migrant destinations abroad (2000). In this story,

Luisa, Gilda‟s mother, having immigrated with her family from Calabria into a tenement building before 1920, is “the village embodied” just as East Harlem is “the village transplanted” (SBU 131), a situation that much resembles that of the West End in Black

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Madonna. As part of the traditional southern customs, Luisa arranges Gilda‟s marriage to

Luigi, also coming from Carolei, the original village that Gilda significantly identifies with a “country,” one of a series “of barely connected countries” that make up Italy in her eyes. On the one hand, social and cultural ties with the Old World and physical proximity in the new urban space seem to play an important role for the reproduction of a common identity outside the village, allowing for traditions to be passed down, although modified.

On the other hand, the identification of a specific area with one‟s ethnic group is depicted as illusory and questionable. Of his old neighborhood, East Harlem, Kym‟s father recalls that “it was safe, it was clean, it was „our‟ place, … so safe you didn‟t even have to lock your door” because only Italian families lived there and had created a strong sense of community based on their notion of territorial possession.

Ragusa sees all the enticement involved in the “mythology of East Harlem” and the “fantasy of total community, total belonging” (119), but she strives to “refuse the seduction” of a safe Italian Harlem, since it “could only exist with the exclusion of those deemed outsiders” (120). Against this ethnocentric viewpoint, she underscores the irony of her Italian family‟s white flight to the suburbs along with a half African American child and the Puerto Rican wife of her father. Besides, a major instance of critical distancing regards specifically Gilda who seems to be haunted by the proximity of the dark-skinned other even after moving to her new house in New Jersey. While watching the movers take away the furniture from the next-door house, Gilda expresses out loud her hope that the new neighbors be white. Kym remains silent but rages inside as she realizes that in spite of the years spent with her grandmother, under the same roof,

Gilda‟s love for her will always be partial because of her ingrained racial prejudice (223).

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These few examples point out that Ragusa‟s project of negotiation requires first of all that she contests and distances herself from any exclusionary and narrow-minded positions and practices, included those which her family members abide by. Her exploration of multiple borders reminds us that they are “physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where … classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy,” according to Anzaldúa‟s definition of Borderlands (preface, unpaged).

However, the South that Ragusa embodies and has in mind is not the border between the

U.S. and Mexico, but a more faraway one, the Mediterranean, the place of origin of her diasporic (maternal and paternal) ancestors, a region that Ian Chambers, in

Mediterranean Crossings, describes in terms of fluid, “porous” borders and “liquid materiality,” but also as a “disquieting space” that national power structures aim to patrol and discipline, physically and culturally (5). If “the fundamentalisms of the land” are rooted in rigid configurations of place, ethnic and cultural belonging, as Franco Cassano argues (Pensiero 7), Ragusa challenges them from this natural, fluid, and porous border between Europe and Africa. She looks at the Mediterranean from New York, descends into it through her physical journey to Sicily, and in that liminal space she also imaginatively builds bridges across borders by disordering traditional boundaries and suggesting new linkages.

Without diminishing the violence that the contact of Italian Americans and

African Americans in New York has historically produced, Ragusa searches for elements that may transform that encounter into a terrain of positive exchange. Digging into her memory, for instance, she recalls that it was her African American grandmother Miriam

166 who introduced her to the ancient Greek/Sicilian myth of Persephone and encouraged her to claim it as part of her Italian heritage (“This is your story, this is where your father’s people come from”), a story of female struggles and bonds, the story of the “girl who is always leaving, whose every homecoming is a goodbye” (106, 107). On the other hand,

Kym says that she was first exposed to jazz music thanks to her father who would play jazz records on his vibraphone for her and tell her about the music of his favorite African

American musicians when she was a child. And yet another boundary is disordered when

Kym returns to East Harlem for the Feast of the Madonna of Mount Carmel to take part in the traditional procession throughout the streets of the once Italian Harlem neighborhood, and that now resembles a “geological formation” for the layers of migration that it has witnessed (145). The connection here between Italian and African images is embedded in the larger choral scene of devotion to the Madonna, the embodiment of a sacred female power, where skins of every color and voices singing in four different languages blend in for a moment: “[h]undreds of people around me, mostly women, Italian Americans, and Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and Haitians, all moving together like an exhalation of breath…. voices filling the air in Spanish and Italian,

French and Creole” (143-4).

Through these cross-cultural references, Ragusa disorders the boundaries between two socially constructed opposite identities, the Italian and the African, and makes them intersect in unexpected spaces and according to new trajectories that underpin a broader vision of the South(s), as the framing parts of the memoir will help us to see.

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3.2 A SICILIAN FRAME WITH A “MERIDIAN” VISION

Following in the footsteps of Barolini‟s The Dream Book and Umbertina, The Skin

Between Us enhances the polyphony of the Italian American female voices, unveiling an original relationship with the Italian South based on old myths and new realities. The myth of Persephone, of the “good girl destined to live a life split in two” (SBU 107) with whom Kym identifies, stresses matrilineal ties and gender struggles that resonate with

Ragusa as much as the Dioscuri embodied the kind of sibling relationships that E. C.

Seidenberg wished to explore. In Greek mythology, the beautiful Persephone or Kore

(“the maiden,” Roman Proserpina) was the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, the goddess of crops and the fertile earth. Zeus promised Persephone to Hades, the ruler of the underworld, who carried her off one spring while she was picking flowers, and took her down to reign as the queen of his home. Angered and in despair, Demeter left the

Olympus to search for Persephone on earth, but unable to find her, neglected the earth to the point that it became barren. Eventually, Hades allowed Persephone to leave and stay with Demeter, but he gave her pomegranate, food of the underworld, to eat (a symbolic act of loss of innocence), thus forcing her to return to her husband for one third of each year, during which Demeter renewed her mourning and the fertile seasons gave way to winter (see “Demeter and Persephone”).

The powerful association of marriage, as a rite of passage, and death as well as the emblematic bond between mother and daughter at the core of this myth have inspired innumerable images and interpretations of the Persephone archetype in the Western

World. These two aspects have prompted interdisciplinary (feminist/cultural/literary)

168 critical explorations of female relationships and experiences within patriarchal cultures

(Hayes), and raised questions of agency in women‟s ritual practices in ancient

Mediterranean societies (see Parca and Tzanedtou).

In the context of Italian American Studies, Barolini suggests that “some reworking of the Demeter/Persephone myth,” – as adopted, for instance, by poet Daniela

Gioseffi – might be a workable model for Italian American women writers (Dream Book

34). This myth provides, in my view, a woman-focused alternative to male-centered power relations and to “the myth of Italian greatness in all its manifestations large and small” that Robert Viscusi has cogently argued to constitute a body of shared beliefs (or

“buried Caesars”) molding Italian American mindsets and culture (15).

Peculiar to Ragusa‟s treatment of the Persephone myth is her emphasis on the grandmother-granddaughter relationship, with the cultural issues that this entails in her case, but also her idea of the descent into the underworld as a voluntary journey of the modern Persephone “into the realm of the ancestors, the realm of memory” (SBU 238).

Ragusa revisits the myth by also visiting its “Sicilian locus,” in Barolini‟s words, “the ultimate in the powerful mother-daughter bond” (Dream Book 34). In so doing, she connects the ancient myth to the contemporary reality of the island. Indeed, the new reality that Ragusa incorporates in the memoir concerns contemporary immigration to

Italy, an aspect that deserves attention for the novel relation between outbound and inbound migrations that this text considers and the political stance it embeds. As the author only glimpses at such reality in the memoir, thus offering an image of Sicily as mainly a mythic landscape, the land of Persephone, I will argue that the negotiating operation that she carries out, at least on a broad cultural level, remains incomplete.

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Nevertheless, I will also contend that placing the memory of Southern emigration within a present-day frame, the memoir meets and complicates current configurations of the

South such as Franco Cassano‟s pensiero meridiano (“meridian thinking”).

In Il pensiero meridiano, sociologist Franco Cassano claims that the cultural autonomy of the South hinges upon a radical redefinition of the relationship between

South and North. Dominant representations of the South as a “non-ancora nord” (“not-yet

North”; VIII),11 always imperfectly mimicking a more advanced North, found themselves on the idea of a linear transition from backwardness to development where the differences are often reduced to a matter of time. If Gramsci‟s The Southern Question deconstructed the Italian North/South binarism by suggesting potential alliances among subordinate groups (namely, Northern workers and Southern peasants), Cassano proposes a spatial rethinking of the South where the connections between the South of Italy and those of the world, particularly the Southern Mediterranean coast, are paramount for the construction of the South as an “other” viewpoint, autonomous and relational at the same time. According to Cassano, physical and cultural distance, difference, confrontation, balance and alternative perceptions of space and time are all attributes of an autonomous

South, capable of self-reflection and site of multiple voices. While these concepts offer suggestive insights to my exploration of southern connections, Cassano‟s view of the

South as epistemologically different from the North-West adds complexity to it. In fact, these two spaces that he conceives independently delineate a typical pattern of migration among Italians, inside and outside of Italy. In this sense, my reading of Ragusa‟s memoir, which is positioned outside of the South that Cassano envisions, both relies on and

170 complicates his argument, as I try to connect the Mediterranean to other, historically displaced and imagined Souths.

Cassano‟s “meridian thinking” advocates a cognitive transformation of our relationship with places and a reconsideration of borders as sites of balance (“misura”), two concepts that Ragusa seems to embrace in her narrative. In it, I maintain that

“misura” is framed as “fusion” since it is conceived within a movement towards a practice of borders (physically embodied and socially inhabited) emphasizing connection and cultural blending. As I have shown above, places matter in The Skin Between Us and equally important is how they are viewed. Except for the narrator‟s visit to Sicily, which frames the book, we are not offered a first sight of places, but rather a “re-vision,” a key operation that Cassano terms “riguardare i luoghi,” which literally means both to look at places again (tornare a guardare) and take care of them (avere riguardo), or, as he puts it, “riguardare la carta geografica, dilatare lo sguardo al di là dei confini nazionali, scorgere connessioni nuove, nuovi vicini e nuovi lontani” (“to look at the map again, broaden one‟s vision beyond the national borders, make out new connections, new proximities and distances”; X), but also “trasformare il rapporto cognitivo ed affettivo con essi” (“to transform one‟s cognitive and emotional ties to them”; X).

As an adult woman, Kym Ragusa riguarda (i.e., looks back at and takes care of) the places of her childhood in New York and engages in a sort of recherche des espaces perdus in order to make sense of the cultural intricacies of her biracial identity. In performing the operation of riguardare i luoghi, Ragusa refuses to adhere to exclusive affiliations such as the “fantasy of total community” while she also articulates a desire and an “anxiety about belonging.” Her re-definition of the embodied liminal space as a

171 terrain where distances can and must be negotiated evokes Cassano‟s own notion of borders. In fact, pensiero meridiano is not attached to a proper territory, but it starts at the conjunction of land and sea, “quando la riva interrompe gli integrismi della terra” (“when the seashore interrupts the fundamentalisms of the land”), when borderlines, rather than announcing the end of something, become the site where “i diversi si toccano” (“the others come in touch”) and the challenge of the exchange with the Other begins (7).

Thus, in Cassano‟s discourse, the borders are the site of “balance” or „misura‟ between land (i.e., shared identity, belonging, social ties) and sea (i.e., departure, journey, individual freedom). Ragusa‟s personal quest for “balance” unfolds primarily in the city of New York, but it is in the “Prologue” and “Epilogue” enclosing, parenthetically, the nine chapters of The Skin Between Us, that the author explicitly blends a familial history of marginalization with a global vision of marginalized Souths.

Significantly, the image of a crossing “between the land and the sea,” to use

Cassano‟s words, opens the three-page Prologue:

I stood on the deck of a ferry crossing the Strait of Messina, the narrow tongue of water that separates mainland Italy from Sicily…. It was cool for that time of year [May], with a bite in the air. Nothing like I had expected. I was unprepared for this journey, as I often have been…. The water was calm but for the ferry‟s wake…. And all around a strange absence of sound, nothing but the deep rumbling of the engine…. For a moment I lost myself in the dizziness, in the engine‟s roar and its vibrations beneath my feet. (SBU 17)

Along with conveying physical discomfort, the image of crossing works as an objective correlative of the inquietude associated with occupying in-between spaces. Ragusa first introduces the narrator in a situation of uncertainty about her own appearance and the

172 perspective of the journey. She recalls her corkscrew hair being pulled back to avoid standing out, and her “feeling, all too familiar, of wanting to climb out of my skin, to be invisible. My skin, dark or light, depending on who‟s looking” (18-9). The uncertainty of the journey is instead due to the loss that prompts it. The concurrent deaths of Gilda and

Miriam, the one following the other “like an immigrant crossing the ocean to meet her sister in a new country,” leave Kym‟s life split in half and in search for a home (19). And thus, at the end of the prologue, she wonders: “What home was I searching for … on my way to Sicily?... Death had propelled me there, an ocean away from Harlem. But it was

Harlem I was thinking of, longing for…. I had to come this far to know that I needed to find my own way back” (19). This idea of the journey in part calls up Paci‟s trip to Italy as a necessary experience in order to come to terms with one‟s heritage. In addition,

Ragusa suggests that in her journey is implied a further personal effort “to negotiate distance” between her grandmothers by means of connecting Sicily and Harlem. As such, the image of crossing the Strait of Messina also comes to embody this desire of mediation that pervades the memoir, in contrast, for instance, with the notion of “fracture”

(“rottura”) that E. C. Seidenberg unequivocally associates with the crossing of the Strait of Gibraltar in Le sabbie del silenzio.

In The Skin Between Us, the movement across the waters of the Strait starts off the narrator‟s storytelling about her ancestors, symbolically underpinning her attempt to render fluid and traversable the gap between them by also recalling the notion of physical fusion:

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Long ago … my paternal grandfather‟s family migrated from Sicily to Calabria…. But I have another connection to this part of the world: Sicily is the crossroads between Europe and Africa, the continent from which my maternal ancestors were stolen…. Two sets of migrations, one forced, one barely voluntary. Two homelands left far behind. Two bloodlines meeting in me. (18)

Mixed with the “unpreparedness” for the physical journey, we can thus detect in the

Prologue a determination about the direction and stance of the narrative journey. After adopting the geographical liminality of Sicily to set the cultural perspective of her work, the author eventually resumes the account of her 1999 trip in the Epilogue, tying it into a larger notion of “descent.” Briefly announced at the end of chapter nine, Kym‟s visit to the city of Enna is linked to a film project on Persephone who was abducted by Hades in the heart of Sicily, according to the myth. That Kym had not decided “what form [the] film would take” may suggest a visual reading of the memoir as a moving picture encompassing (as it does) a series of frames or photographic images, including the prologue and epilogue that make up the literary frame. Strictly speaking, the latter should follow each other in a photographic album, having been “taken” at the same time in

Sicily. Instead, Ragusa shows the “picture” of the sea crossing at the beginning and keeps the one portraying her experience on the island for last. This collocation, in Cassano‟s terms, would ideally make the main body of the memoir into a journey of “balance” between land and sea. I would like to stress, nevertheless, that the Epilogue, while showing the end of a personal journey, opens up an even more challenging enterprise of cultural connection and fusion of Kym‟s various “selves,” which is merely hinted at in the memoir, and involves a broader vision of interconnected Souths, “connessioni nuove, nuovi vicini e nuovi lontani,” to quote again Cassano.

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Rather than emphasizing her uncertainties, the Epilogue brings to the fore Kym‟s conscious embracement of in-betweenness as a space of choice. As such, she portrays her journey as the embodiment of the double “descent” that she pursues: a search into heritage, blood, “a lineage of mothers and daughters” losing and finding each other “over and over again” (237), as well as a descent into the mythic underworld, “the realm of the ancestors” and memory, that ties Persephone to Hades. As in the rest of the memoir,

Ragusa‟s linguistic selection reflects the powerful bond of female descent, as illustrated in the Sicilian proverb “Cu bona reda voli fari, di figghia fimmina avi a cuminciari” (“A good descent starts with a girl”; 237), or expressed in the closing image of Persephone

“choosing her own fate” (238), which evokes Ragusa‟s choice of marginality as site of resistance against oppression and essentialisms. Moreover, from the mountains of Enna, where Demeter is said to have first searched for her stolen daughter, the author offers a gendered view of Sicily, relying on her characteristic blend of geographical and corporeal lexicon: “[T]he island‟s body unfolding like a woman‟s, all curves and undulation…. The earth itself is variegated, patches of green fields and brown fields, and black fields…. It looks like skin, dry in some places, smooth in others, old and young skin, pale and dark skin” (234).

Calling up a favorite myth and the racial boundaries at the center of the memoir, this depiction introduces the narrator‟s visit of Palermo that occupies most of the

Epilogue marking a transition from the mythical face to the contemporary reality of

Sicily. Exploring for the first time the streets of Palermo, “the site of thousands of years of invasion and violation, accommodation and amalgamation,” Kym observes the composite identity of the city, its “layers of history” exposed on buildings, people‟s faces,

175 and language (234). In so doing, she establishes a relation between this urban space, the heterogeneous history and topography of Harlem, and her complex family background.

From the general impressions, the narrator turns then to describe her last night in the old Arab quarter of the city, La Kalsa, among the ruins of buildings bombed during

World War II and occupied by low-income Sicilians, African and Asian immigrants. To express the neglected state of that area by city authorities and better-off palermitani, her newly met blond Sicilian friend (another incarnation of the island‟s racial crossings) draws a simile with a familiar place: “Palermo is like your Harlem - we are the blacks of

Italy. And La Kalsa is the Harlem of Palermo” (235). Through this figurative detour, La

Kalsa, from its local position of otherness (a South within a South), is transported into a much larger circuit where unconventional associations can be activated. In fact, while

“the blacks of Italy” recalls the well-known topos of the subaltern and racialized Italian

South within the traditional North/South relationship, the memoir seems to proceed, in its

Epilogue, in the direction of a possible encounter between transnational southern identities within the globalized space of La Kalsa. In this corner of Sicily, Kym is an outsider; as such, she readily records what she sees and hears around her: women sitting on lawn chairs, cutting pieces of fruit; young men smoking and listening to rap music; little Bengali girls walking hand in hand and speaking to each other in Sicilian; African prostitutes guarded by their pimps; local artists squatting a semi-destroyed building; wild plants and feral cats sharing the ruins of such an awkward urban space; and Sicilian sounds, reminiscent of her grandfather Luigi‟s language, reverberating in the air.

By choosing Palermo and the liminal, decaying, relatively unsafe neighborhood of La Kalsa, the writer links her personal story to other experiences of in-betweenness,

176 consistently with her strategic use of marginality. In particular, this “other” Southern space, quickly sketched out, suggests a vision of marginality as “location of radical openness and possibility” (hooks 53) across geographical, cultural, and color borders. To sustain this concept, Ragusa inserts in the context of La Kalsa a few elements that reconnect with the previous chapters, such as the immediate bond with other minority women, and children‟s games as performances of racial boundaries or, instead, social solidarity. For example, she refers of a conversation with a Portuguese woman of

Angolan descent (Amalia), who recently moved to La Kalsa with her local boyfriend, in these terms: “We spoke most of the night in a mixture of broken Italian and broken

English, excited to have found each other, two biracial women from different ends of the

African diaspora, each of us with a strong emotional connection to Sicily” (236).

Moreover, the depiction of La Kalsa ends with a hallucinated vision conflating the local into the global Souths while Kym is watching a multiracial group of boys playing soccer together on an open field:

Some of the boys were African, their skin black as obsidian against the olive and light brown skin of the Sicilians…. The boys shouted and laughed, competed and showed off for each other. The sun grew hot against my shoulders, and a faint breeze rustled the fronds of the palm trees that stood along one side of the field. For a moment I lost track of where I was – was it Palermo, or Cairo, or Lagos, or Harlem? (237)

Drawing unexpected links, Ragusa configures La Kalsa as a site that synecdochically contains the global Souths and their multiple voices, cultures, and skin colors. In other words, she experiences what I called “fusion.” This marginalized urban space appears to fulfill her general goal of cultural connection, even if more as a utopian rather than an

177 actualized place of border crossing, exchange, and alliance between subordinate subjects.

Indeed, the penetration of the social reality of La Kalsa seems to remain somewhat superficial and, in any case, relegated to the margins of the book. The cohabitation of low income locals and migrants in this historic neighborhood of Palermo is an interesting phenomenon that certainly calls for a more in-depth socio-cultural investigation of migration issues in that specific area and in other parts of Palermo or other large Italian cities.12 In this respect, The Skin Between Us is an inspirational work that by providing an

“other” viewpoint on Italy‟s past and current migrations not only brings new topics of investigation into the Italian American literary tradition but also creates a bridge with contemporary cultural productions of/on immigrants to Italy that focus on racial liminality and urban locations of immigration. In fact, Ragusa‟s narrative journey ultimately reveals that the author envisions the possibility of bridging the distance between Gilda and Miriam, and thus between fair, dark and darker-skinned people, in the interconnected spatialities of race and belonging beyond national boundaries.

In broadening her gaze beyond New York and the Unites States to reach out to the

Mediterranean, Ragusa also brings into question our approach to theoretical configurations of the Italian and the global South(s). As I have suggested, Cassano‟s articulation of a “meridian thinking” relies on notions of balance, place and borders that

Ragusa autonomously elaborates from her own peculiar position. To some extent, therefore, she embraces and sustains his vision of the South, and her memoir can be called an instance of “meridian thinking” insofar as this “esiste in forme disperse e talvolta malate …: lo si può trovare nei nostri sud interiori, in una follia, in un silenzio … nei sentimenti dove vivono più patrie, dove alla semplicità del sì e del no si sostituiscono

178 i molti veli della verità” (“exists in scattered and sometimes sick forms …: you can find it in our inner souths, in madness, in a silence … in sentiments where more countries live together, where the many veils of truth replace the simple yes or not”; Cassano, Pensiero

9). However, the boundaries of the polyphonic Souths that both Cassano and Ragusa imagine do not seem to coincide. More exactly, to return to Verdicchio and some of the issues considered in the previous chapter, Ragusa appears to be a “decontextualized subaltern” interlocutor from Cassano‟s standpoint. In fact, as I recalled, the South and the

North-West that the sociologist conceives are epistemologically different spaces throughout Il pensiero meridiano while Ragusa‟s memoir seems to defy such a categorical separation by foregrounding the links among the displaced Souths that migrations have produced in Northern contexts.

Norma Bouchard, in her analysis of Cassano‟s search for a “subalternized archive” (I will return to the concept of “archive” in the conclusions) of potentially redeemable humanistic values in the ancient Mediterranean, has commented that “the connections that Cassano draws seek to establish a transnational dialogue among peripheral zones that, despite their differences, share some commonalities.” I agree with

Bouchard when she states that the latter are to be located in the peripheral position of

“meridione” not only in Italy and Europe but also in relation to its history of massive migrations (306). In other words, while Cassano‟s focus is territorially circumscribed within the Mediterranean, his notion of “riguardare la carta geografica, dilatare lo sguardo al di là dei confini nazionali, scorgere connessioni nuove, nuovi vicini e nuovi lontani” encourages us, along the lines of Verdicchio‟s work, to see and explore the links

179 between the Italian South and its transoceanic migrations, and to examine it also in relation to Italy‟s current position in the Mediterranean.

The question fundamentally remains whether or not the “decontextualized subaltern” can speak and have a say about Italian identity from its deterritorialized position. I believe that this can only hold true if we recognize and engage with the multiple layers of ties, affiliations, and conflicts resulting from Italy‟s diasporas and shaping the cultures produced by migrations. To this end, the instances of “meridian thinking” contained in The Skin Between Us, although not fully developed, invite to reconsider, or look at again, southern connections in a larger, transnational, framework centered on the common liminal positions of migrant and non-migrant groups and aimed at voicing the “irreducible pluriverse” of the Mediterranean (Cassano xxiv) inside as well as outside its territorial borders.

Notes

1. One 1860 letter from the Piedmont envoy in the South to Count Cavour states: “What barbarism! Some Italy! This is Affrica [sic]: the Bedouins are the flower of civilized virtues compared to these peasants” (qtd. in Bertellini, Italy in Early American Cinema 69).

2. On the “picturesque” view of Italy‟s South even before 1861, see Bertellini, Italy, Part I. Some of the classic analyses on the South are: Franchetti and Sonnino, La Sicilia nel 1876; Fortunato, Il Mezzogiorno e lo Stato italiano. Discorsi politici (1880-1910); Nitti, Scritti sulla questione meridionale; Salvemini, Scritti sulla questione meridionale (1896-1955). On the backward/modern metaphor as an articulation of spatial differences in temporal terms that has acquired status of myth in relation to Italy within Europe, see John Agnew, “The Myth of Backward Italy in Modern Europe,” Revisioning Italy: National Identity and Global Culture, ed. Allen and Russo 23-42.

3. In L’Italia barbara contemporanea. Studi ed appunti (1898), Niceforo claimed that a “differenza di razza” motivated the socially uneven development of Italy: “Sono veramente due Italie stridenti tra di loro, con una colorazione morale e sociale del tutto diversa … [Q]uesta diversità è anche fisica, poiché l‟Italia è formata da due stirpi ben dissimili tra loro, anzi di caratteri fisici e psicologici del tutto diversi; una di queste stirpi popola il nord e il centro, l‟altra il sud e le isole” (287). To explain the “differenza di razza” between the arî of the North and the

180 mediterranei of the South, Niceforo relied on Giuseppe Sergi‟s understanding of racial difference in terms of cranial features rather than skin color (Origine e diffusione della stirpe mediterranea. Induzioni antropologiche). On the “Aryan” race of the North vs. the “negroid” race of South, see also Niceforo, Italiani del nord e del sud (1901). On Lombroso and Southern prejudice, see Roberta Passione, “Il Sud di Lombroso tra scienze e politica,” Il Risorgimento 52.1 (2000): 133- 54. For general views of race in Italy, see Alberto Burgio, ed., Nel nome della razza: il razzismo nella storia d'Italia 1870-1945.

4. Incidentally, by introducing this statement with “Despite charges of colonial annexation,” Bertellini seems to imply a disagreement with Verdicchio‟s view of the North/South relation as “colonial in character” (Bound by Distance). Bertellini‟s understanding of Southernism encompasses “Southernist mimesis,” that is, the receptive process of Southernism by Southern Italian culture, especially with regard to cinema and theatre, both in Italy and in the migrant communities abroad. He argues that, as a cultural dynamic entailing both internalization and reaction to hostile prejudices, “Southernist mimesis enhanced reciprocal communication between North and South” (71). On this topic, see specifically chapters 2 and 7 of his Italy in Early American Cinema.

5. Niceforo, in L’Italia barbara, used the English term “self-government” that, in the American racial culture, expressed the identification of citizenship with whiteness (qtd. in Bertellini, Italy 73). For a legislative study of such identification and the consequent racialization of European immigrants in the work of the 1911 US Immigration Commission (or Dillingham Commission), from which resulted the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, both aimed at reducing the influx of “undesirable” immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, see Desmond King, Making Americans: Immigration Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy. About four million Italians, mostly from the South, emigrated to the United States between 1891 and 1920. On the racial and color status of Italian immigrants, see Jennifer Guglielmo, “Introduction: White Lies, Dark Truths,” Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America, ed. J. Guglielmo and Salerno 1-14; Thomas A. Guglielmo, “„No Color Barrier‟: Italians, Race, and Power in the United States,” Are Italians White?, ed. Gugliemo and Salerno 29-43, and White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago 1890-1945. According to Thomas A. Guglielmo, while on government‟s naturalization forms “South Italian” or “North Italian” identified the immigrants‟ “race” (with all the connotations of inferiority going with this), the “color” status of all Italians was “white,” which made available to them many socio-economic benefits denied to other groups. On the rewards of whiteness in the United States see George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Some historical reconstructions of racism against Italians, lynchings and negative stereotyping are provided in Mangione and Morreale, La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience (see especially chapter 13, “New Orleans – Wops, Crime, and Lynchings”); and Bitter Bread (Pane Amaro), a recent documentary by Gianfranco Norelli and Suma Kurien (2009), which shares with Ragusa‟s memoir a focus on East Harlem, also called Italian Harlem in the 1930s.

6. Ragusa‟s memoir has been translated into Italian as La pelle che ci separa (transl. by Caterina Romeo and Clara Antonucci, 2008). Her essays have appeared in several collections and journals, such as: Are Italians White: How Race is Made in America, ed. Guglielmo and Salerno 213-23; The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture, ed. DeSalvo and Giunta 276-82; About Face: Women Write about What They See When They Look in the Mirror, ed. Burt and Baker Kline 55-62; Leggendaria 46 (2004): 26-7; and TutteStorie: Racconti letture trame di donne (2001): 70-2. Ragusa is also the author of the short films

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Demarcations (1992), Passing (1996), and fuori/outside (1997). The last two have been shown on PBS and at film festivals throughout North America and Europe and deal with themes present in her memoir. Passing, in black and white, is based on her maternal grandmother‟s recollection of a road trip to Miami in 1959 and illustrates the ambiguity of racial identity and the artificiality of the black/white dualism. fuori/outside, presented in the form of a letter to her Italian American grandmother, explores racial conflicts within the filmmaker‟s family and between Southern Italians and African Americans in New York. For detailed analyses, see Edvige Giunta, “Figuring Race,” Are Italians White?, ed. Guglielmo and Salermo 224-33; Livia Tenzer, “Documenting Race and Gender: Kym Ragusa Discusses Passing and Fuori/Outside.” Women Studies Quarterly 30 (2002): 213-220.

7. As I specified in the introduction, I use “horizontally” according to Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih‟s theorization of “minor transnationalism.”

8. In his historical account, Robert Orsi asserts that four factors contributed to the “dilemma of inbetweenness” for Southern Italian immigrants in Northern and Midwestern US cities: “the use of racist categories by northern Italians” against southerners, “the assumption of this same discourse by American commentators,” “the coincidence of this [southern] migration with the movement of other darker skinned peoples into North American cities, and the determination of southern Italians to make dignified lives for themselves” in the new context (314).

9. On the question of the culturally constructed whiteness of Italian immigrants in the United States, see Guglielmo and Salerno, Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America; David Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White. The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (especially part II, “Inbetweenness”); Robert Orsi, “The Religion Boundaries of an Inbetween People: Street Feste and the Problem of the Dark-Skinned Other in Italian Harlem, 1920-1990.” American Quarterly 44.3 (1992): 313-47; George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness.

10. For literary explorations of “passing” (also beyond its strict meaning of moving from the black to the white side of the color line), see Elaine K. Ginsberg, Passing and the Fictions of Identity; Werner Sollors, Neither Black nor White yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (1997); Gayle Wald, Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture; Laura Browder, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities; Steven J. Belluscio, To Be Suddenly White: Literary Realism and Racial Passing. The latter, in particular, provides an interesting comparative analysis of passing narratives from the African American, Jewish, and Italian American traditions. On the trope of passing in Italian American women‟s literature, see also Edvige Giunta, Writing with an Accent, Chapter 4.

11. All translations from Il pensiero meridiano are mine. See also the forthcoming book co-edited and co-translated by Norma Bouchard, Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean; and, Cassano and Fogu, “Il pensiero meridiano oggi: Intervista e dialoghi con Franco Cassano” in California Italian Studies Journal, 1.1 (2010).

12. In “New Arrivals, Old Places: Demographic Changes and New Planning Challenges in Palermo and Naples,” International Planning Studies 13.4 (Nov 2008): 361-89, Francesco Lo Piccolo and Davide Leone discuss the impact of recent planning policies, regarded as sustainable but underestimating “social sustainability (i.e. social inclusion)” in the inner urban areas of the

182 two major cities of the South where there is a predominance of new ethnic inhabitants. With respect to the historic center of Palermo, they note that “the most characteristic place of the city, in which there are the signs of the stratification of different cultures, has become the preferred place for people who now come from other cultures and countries of origin. This cultural, and perhaps romantic way of considering the phenomenon, misreads the real reason for the immigrants preference for this location, which is only marginally influenced by the cultural inheritance. The real reason is to be found in the availability of inexpensive housing and in the opportunity to find informal work, or to establish small entrepreneurship and commercial activities” (366).

CONCLUDING WITH LAMERICA

La commistione di familiare e spaventoso è ormai sistematica: del primo si ha ancora notizia solo quando ci si imbatte nel secondo. (Paolo Virno, Esercizi di esodo 134)

The writings analyzed in the past three chapters have provided crucial input and ideas for the creation of an interpretative model that I have referred to as “moving thresholds.” Its foundational element, as I announced in the introduction, is movement in its empirical, figurative, and even emotional meanings. The spatial image of the threshold associated with movement has made it possible to configure, dynamically interconnect, and address three main areas of inquiry: the liminal position of the Italian migrant subject; the aesthetic modes of liminality and their relations to memory; and, Italian identity and canonic disciplinary boundaries.

Envisioning thresholds as marginal crossing areas, I have highlighted the fundamental tension between movement and stasis at play in the liminal space that migrants, post-migrants, and their cultures occupy. By focusing on literary (and, occasionally, visual, as for example in Cagli Seidenberg‟s Lo Sgombero) representations of thresholds, my analyses have stressed, on the one hand, the silencing processes imposed upon subjects and cultural objects (such as books) inhabiting liminality, that is, people and works finding themselves in a position of in-betweenness. I have argued that essentialist constructs of national, racial, and cultural identity produce and reproduce

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184 multiple layers of marginality, ranging from the expulsion of the single individual to the exclusion of a dialogue with the cultural texts on the Italian migratory experience. On the other hand, my understanding of the circulation of Italian people, practices, and ideas across North America throughout the XX century relies on a more active and productive notion of inhabiting liminality, whereby migrants and migratory texts, rather than being simply conceived as marginal and silent, are viewed as participating in a transnational discourse on Italian identity in their role of carriers of relocation stories and, as such, of new cultural insights useful to the current re-configuration of Italy as a country of immigration. As a result, more than the limits of the liminal condition, my project has emphasized the critical function of thresholds as sites of negotiation that can help us rethink, mobilize and reshape the borders of the distinct insides and outsides that they separate and bridge at once, that is, the images of Italy and the „Italies outside of Italy.‟

Reading the works of Ebe Cagli Seidenberg, Frank Paci, and Kym Ragusa, I have compared and contrasted diasporic themes and tropes that these writers, speaking from peculiar positions, have adopted to creatively reject the either/or dichotomy (Italian/Jew, black/white, Italian/Canadian, etc.). In this closing section of the dissertation, I argue that it is useful to insist on the contribution that the deconstructive perspective informing my idea of moving thresholds may bring to the understanding of the Italian diaspora within a socio-historical context of immigration to Italy. Keeping in mind the afore-mentioned areas of inquiry (movement and identity of the migrant subject; aesthetics of liminality and memory; disciplinary boundaries) I will attempt to outline the theoretical relevance and insights of “moving thresholds” for the field of Italian Studies and contemporary discourse on Italian national identity through a look of the film Lamerica (1994).

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Gianni Amelio‟s Lamerica ideally concludes the journeys analyzed in the past chapters between Italy and North America by recasting the main issues therein addressed

– the refugee status and uprootedness, generational clash, territorial proximity and ethnic distancing – in a visual narrative that takes inspiration from the mass exodus from

Albania that occurred in 1991, after the collapse of the communist regime.1 Even though a close analysis of Lamerica is beyond the scope of this final chapter, I wish to prompt a conversation between this visual text and the other literary works by emphasizing the film‟s representation of Italian identity in relation to movement and space.

Lamerica simultaneously embraces multiple trajectories and crossings, both real and imagined, which concern geographical as well as identity thresholds. The post-

Communist Albania of Amelio appears to be a prison-like country, where the government prohibits its citizens from fleeing abroad while, at the same time, opening its doors to foreign investors. Such a disparity generates a unique interplay of movements in the film, opposing the initial arrival at Dürres, in Albania, of the Italian businessmen Fiore

(Michele Placido) and Gino (Enrico Lo Verso), with the continuous crowds of Albanians trying to reach the port from the hinterland and embark for the coast of Puglia, in southern Italy. For the director, “[i]t seemed right that the arc of the film should stretch between two expanses of water, that the story should symbolically lie enclosed between two ports” (in Vitti 260). This double trajectory echoes the neat separation between

Italians and Albanians that is conveyed, in the beginning, through images of local destitution contrasted by the economic prosperity that Gino and Fiore arrogantly display.

However, in the unfolding narrative, Gino‟s identity undergoes a process of

“Albanianization” consisting in the gradual dispossession of material objects (i.e., car,

186 money, clothing, and passport) and his reduction to the same conditions of the Albanian refugees. These, in turn, seem to have gone through an “Italianization” as a result of popularized Italian television shows portraying Italy as a land of opportunity and well- being. Eventually, Gino mingles with the Albanian refugees on his way back to Italy, finding himself literally and figuratively on the same rusty ship.

In the film, identity boundaries and trajectories are further complicated by the presence of Spiro (Carmelo Di Mazzarelli), a deranged old man that Gino and Fiore discover in a former labor camp and appoint president of an imaginary shoe factory

(“Alba calzature”) that they try to set up with fraudulent intentions. While they select

Spiro as a figurehead by virtue of his Albanian citizenship, required by law to establish their business, after the first forty minutes of Lamerica, he finally speaks up, revealing his Italian identity. Spiro is, in reality, Michele Talarico, a Sicilian (like Gino) who deserted the army during the Fascist occupation of Albania and assumed an Albanian identity, although he is convinced of being twenty-years-old, living in the Italy of the

1940s and being returning to his wife and young son in Sicily. Spiro is largely responsible for Gino‟s odyssey across Albania and a more respectful concept of the

Other. Indeed, escaping by train the orphanage to which he has been consigned, Spiro obliges Gino to pursue him through the Albanian countryside, which sets in motion a series of incidents that transform the young materialistic character into a powerless and speechless refugee. After locating Spiro/Michele in a hospital, Gino discovers the man‟s real identity in a remote outpost where the wheels of his jeep, the icon of his power, are stolen. The two continue their journey to Tirana first on a bus and then on a truck packed with Albanians trying to reach the port. Once in the city, Gino is charged with fraud,

187 jailed, and later released and advised to leave immediately. As the police officer withholds his passport, Gino is thus forced to return to Italy like any other Albanian, without legal documents. Among the migrants cramming the ship, he unexpectedly meets

Spiro/Michele who, by now, imagines he is leaving the destitution of post-war Italy for

America, thus adding a further symbolic trajectory to the film.

Through the journey motif, Lamerica radically complicates the dichotomously spatialized categories of “Italian” and “Albanian” showing “a particularly postmodern understanding of culture and identity” (O‟Healy 253) that is in tune with the positions articulated in the works previously examined and the views that I have embraced in this dissertation. Peculiar to such a postmodern perspective is the concept of culture and identity as constructs that rely on the existing modus operandi and traditional models of knowledge while constantly being reshaped in the light of emerging socio-economic phenomena, changing political concerns, and new epistemological tools. Drawing on this dynamic and anti-essentialist interpretation of culture and ethnicity, my research has focused on the subjective dimension of migratory processes, that is, on the production, reproduction, and transformation of individual women‟s and men‟s identities across specific contexts of departure and arrival, and over multiple generations. Proceeding against a simplistic view of the migrants as representatives of this or that culture or ethnic group, this angle has placed at its center their subjectivity (in line with what Mezzadra supports in Diritto 18-9), and brought to the fore the oft-disregarded complexity of their identities and conflicting emotions.

This is not to suggest that the objective circumstances of migration have been ignored in this project, but rather, incorporated in a larger discourse on identity, exclusion

188 and belonging. For instance, in the first chapter, the expulsion of the Italian Jews dictated by the Fascist racial laws has been seen as a pivotal factor for the development of the suspended identity and poetics of Ebe Cagli Seidenberg. The material deprivation of post-World War II Italy has become part of Frank Paci‟s own double focus on the displacement experienced by working-class migrants in Canada (Black Madonna) and the transition of Italy into an industrial country in the 1950s and 1960s (Italian Shoes). In

Ragusa‟s work, instead, I have given prominence to the internal migrations of Italians from New York City to the suburbs (“white flight”) as a result more of a social desire to construct a “white” identity for themselves than of economic pressures.

From my textual analyses, movement, in terms of physical and cultural uprootedness, has emerged as a potent stimulus to the formation of hybrid migrant and post-migrant identities, often engaged in antagonistic operations of preservation, adaptation, and innovation, and characterized by equally conflicting feelings of loss, rejection, and emancipation. In highlighting these tensions, I have not only meant to contest ontological national identifications but also a certain, postmodern understanding of hybridism as a fluid crossing of linguistic, political, and cultural spaces. Viewing uprootedness as a source of versatile, “globalized,” identities brings the risks of underestimating the role of material borders in migrants‟ lives and in the distribution of resources on a global scale, while also trivializing the critical task that borders can accomplish from a perspective of cultural hybridism. For this reason, the act of crossing – a key image in this work – has been frequently associated with borders of various nature in order to explore their disruptive potential of fixed categories without losing sight of their power to contain and restrict the circulation of migrants and cultural practices. In

189 other words, I have put forward an approach that encompasses the recognition of borders and aims to tactically (in de Certeau‟s terms) reconfigure them.

My readings have led to the conclusion that migrants‟ multiple affiliations rely on a great deal of human, social, and cultural tensions and on constant efforts to turn limits into possibilities, borders into thresholds or limina to inhabit. Moreover, under different circumstances and forms, the exclusions and struggles emphasized throughout these chapters with respect to the Italian diaspora arguably apply to Italy‟s immigrants as well.

Along this route, Lamerica‟s postmodern grasp of identity does not omit to stress the weight of legal restrictions upon migrants‟ movements and the manipulations occurring around their identities. When Spiro‟s Italian origins are revealed, potentially undermining the fraudulent plans of Fiore and Gino, the latter promptly makes reference to the authority of the legal documents attesting to Spiro‟s Albanian citizenship (“Are you

Albanian or Italian? Tell me who the fuck you are! If your papers say you‟re Albanian, that‟s all right by me”). Later on, Gino‟s claims to the rights granted by his Italian citizenship are muted when an officer strips him of his own passport before releasing him from prison (“Where do I go without a passport?” “But in Albania no one has documents”). Suddenly, from a position of power (i.e., the exploitative investor abroad)

Gino officially falls into the same category – undocumented migrant – of thousands of

Albanians.

Through this specific element of Gino‟s Albanianization, Lamerica not only evokes an aspect of Italy‟s emigrations (i.e., the labeling of Italians as WOPs –without papers – in U.S.) but connects it to contemporary questions about immigration policies, reception procedures, and social perceptions of the immigrants in Italy, all topics that

190 have sparked heated political and public debates since the 1991 landings and up to the present. Over the years, immigration has been conceptualized as an “invasion” of foreigners, a political problem, and a source of social and economic concern for Italians.

Consequently, those debates have tended to make sweeping negative assumptions about migrants that, as such, are considered suspicious objects to classify and keep under control, both spatially and culturally. This view flattens out the subjective dimension of migrants that I have focused on, their in-between positioning and the vulnerability attached to their legal status, as Ebe Cagli Seidenberg‟s refugee characters have shown.

And in so doing, it feeds fear of the Other and xenophobic feelings, while attempting to de-emphasize the flaws in the Italian immigration and citizenship policies.

Such a topic is complex and cannot be dealt with here with the attention that it deserves, but one need only bear in mind that despite the positive sign of net migration had, since the 1970s, pointed to the new role of Italy as a host country, it was not until the mid-1980s that Italy started revising its obsolete immigration rules that still reflected a

Fascist concept of the foreigner as a potential peril to the regime (Amato 103). The frightening prospect of an Albanian “invasion” resulted in restrictive and convoluted laws based on the principle of nationality and effectively neutralizing the social and human aspects of the migrants, often making them slip into the condition of “non-persons”

(“non-persone”), according to Alessandro Dal Lago‟s definition (207-13). From another standpoint, the distressing images that several Italian televisions broadcast live from

Puglia in 1991 were shocking for the Italian audience at large, not used to such a massive flow of refugees. The media coverage of the Albanian arrival represented perhaps the first exposure that the Italians had to this phenomenon on a national scale, announcing

191 the sensationalist approach to migration issues that thenceforth pervaded the media world and the spectacularization of frontier places.2

Unfortunately, I could not accommodate in this project the voices and cultural challenges that migrants have brought to Italy in the last thirty years or so and their contributions to the redefinition of Italian national identity within a multicultural and multiracial framework. However, the alarming episodes of racial and ethnic intolerance characterizing the current political and social climate seem to suggest that a critical rethinking of borders is necessary across-the-board. In this respect, the model of the moving thresholds here developed in relation to emigration to North America offers conceptual tools that may also prove useful in the context of immigration to Italy. I will discuss the connection between the two phenomena by resorting to Amelio‟s use of space in Lamerica, which also elucidates the second area of inquiry mentioned above, that is, the interplay of liminal aesthetic representation and memory that has emerged from the textual analyses.

The disruption of rigid national identifications operated in the film, and described above through its characters and narrative unfolding, finds one of its key supporting elements in the role of Albania as a space for denunciation. In fact, Albania provides an external, and yet nearby, viewpoint to comment on past and present Italy, as Gianni

Amelio maintained in a 1995 interview about Lamerica:

It‟s a film about two Italies, really – the Italy of my father and the Italy of today in which I live. My father‟s Italy was poor but full of hope. Today, my Italy is very cynical and arid. These two Italies could only meet in a neutral territory, a foreign country. In my film, two businessmen, who represent the new Italy, meet the old Italy in Albania, which is the neutral territory. I chose a country like Albania

192

because I believe Albania today is like Italy used to be. Historically, Italy and Albania are very close and, in a way, Italy has invaded Albania twice – militarily in 1939 and today, or more recently, by television. (Crowdus and Georgakas 198)

Relying on the spatial approach that I have adopted throughout this dissertation, I contend that Amelio‟s conceptualization of Albania resonates with Soja‟s definition of

Thirdspaces as “„dominated spaces,‟ the spaces of the peripheries, the margins and the marginalized,” retrievable “in individual and collective identities from the most local to the most global,” and treated as “strategic location[s]” of resistance and transformation

(68, see also introduction). In Lamerica, Albania is historically and culturally pictured as a dominated space. Under the opening credits, we are shown the archival footage of the

1939 Italian invasion, which suggests an analogy between the totalitarian regimes of

Mussolini and Enver Hoxha, who kept Albania completely isolated until his death in

1985. At the same time, the newsreel points to one of the two invasions recalled by

Amelio, which was grounded in Italy‟s colonial interests under Fascism. It is important to note here that Amelio‟s film, by incorporating the film footage, acts as a corrective of the bombastic propaganda shown in the early newsreel, thus inserting a meta-filmic moment that becomes a space to reflect on the role of image, and moving image in particular. The other form of colonization recalled in the interview coincides, instead, with the flood of

Italian television shows in Albania after Hoxha‟s death. The propagandistic and

“spectacular” images of Italy provided by these shows are widely illustrated and criticized within the film, while evoking that sensationalist approach of the media to migration underlined above.

193

Nevertheless, Lamerica encourages an identification of Italy with Albania rather than casting this double domination in terms of opposition and distancing. In fact, the

Albanian space is “strategically” (according to Soja‟s use of “strategic,” or perhaps

“tactically,” in de Certeau‟s sense) framed to awaken the forgotten memory of a familiar past of poverty and hope among Italians. It is conceived of as a mirror of the “old Italy” of the 1940s, best embodied by Spiro/Michele, and as a “neutral territory” where that

Italy meets “the new Italy” of Fiore and Gino. As Amelio puts it, the latter represent the

“cynical and arid” Italy of the 1990s that, having reached a certain well-being, has lost the value of simple things such as bread (a theme repeated throughout the film along with shoes), and consequently, cannot understand the feelings of the hungry. For a character like Fiore, the older partner and an experienced wheeler-dealer, to modify his dishonest attitude toward the Albanians and in his business practices is unimaginable. Gino‟s story suggests, instead, that change is still possible for a new generation of Italians grown up ignorant, arrogant and with the ambition of making easy profits and showing their assets.

In this regard, Spiro/Michele, reaching out from the past as a ghost, acts as a father figure to Gino. He shows him the old-school dignified humility of the dispossessed and the struggles of survival in a devastated country, which is at once the real Albania of the early 1990s and the imagined postwar Italy that it evokes.

Furthermore, within this treatment of Albania as a “strategic location” of resistance against collective amnesia, a particular relevance is given to Italian emigration as a result of the director‟s family history. Amelio mentally associated the destitution of the Albanians seen on television in 1991 with that of his father, who had emigrated to

Argentina when Gianni was only a year-and-a-half, in 1947, a period that also saw his

194 uncle, and many Southern Italians, leave their impoverished families to reach the

Americas. The facts of 1991 unexpectedly provided the Calabrian cineaste with a suitable context for the realization of a film on Italy‟s postwar migrations that he had long planned but never accomplished. Traveling to and through Albania gave him and the scriptwriters Andrea Porporati and Alessandro Sermoneta the general impression of having returned to postwar Italy, which led to the film subject.3 Eventually, the memory of the Italian migrants‟ letters and their uncertain orthography suggested the “strategic” misspelling of the film title (originally “L‟America”), thus reflecting an idea of migration as seen by those who migrate, a movement filled with a sense of adventure and hope that carries along also mistakes and illusory views of the promised land. Lamerica was thus the outcome of the fictional encounter between past and present Italy through migration.

Amelio‟s adoption of a dominated space to emphasize the role of historical memory holds multiple points of intersection with the aesthetics of liminality examined in this dissertation. A fundamental element of connection consists in the notion of dominated spaces as “strategic locations” of struggle, resistance, and change. Along with

Turner‟s liminality, de Certeau‟s “place” and “space,” and a number of other concepts,

Soja‟s Thirdspace has contributed to define an idea of thresholds that embraces the subordinated spatiality of interstices and margins, their perils and possibilities. In order to verify the capacity of these sites to resist obliviousness and forge emancipatory change, I have proceeded by looking simultaneously at spaces as “perceived” and “conceived,” that is, as empirically measurable (i.e., Firstspaces) and “discursively devised” (i.e.,

Secondspaces, Soja 74-9). Therefore, like Albania in Lamerica, places such as the neighborhoods of Harlem in New York, the West End in Sault St. Marie, Ontario, the

195

Berkeley Hills in California, and other locations, both in the U.S. and Italy (e.g.,

Baltimore, Rome, Novilara, and Palermo) have been treated as sites of “real-and- imagined” journeys, or first- and secondspaces, to use Soja‟s terms.

Examining “perceived” spaces has permitted to trace a map of physical movements (departures, arrivals, and returns) between Italy and America; explore, compare, and contrast social and spatial practices within specific North American and

Italian realities (households, neighborhoods, towns and cities); and, inquiry into how material geographies affect subjective and group identities, class, gender, ethnic, and racial consciousness. Some texts (e.g., The Skin between Us and Black Madonna) have further developed the question of the social production of material spaces by providing historical accounts of urban change to explain phenomena of local migration, community dispersal (Paci), and construction of racial identity (Ragusa).

A merely empirical consideration of space, on a diegetic level, suggests that the margins of resistance to dominant practices, especially for women, are restricted to certain spaces and do not necessarily lead to possible emancipation. Assunta‟s stubborn habits in Black Madonna are paradigmatic in this sense, in that her rejection to adapt to a foreign environment also exemplifies an exacerbation of “tactical” practices that proves stifling for the relationship between migrant parents and their children. And, to a lesser degree, a defensive attitude toward change is visible in a more malleable character like

Adamo and even within zia Gina‟s non-migrant family in Italian Shoes. These examples also show that while providing a reassuring sense of continuity in a migratory context, the preservation of memory (personal, national, linguistic, etc.) can play an oppressive role. Indeed, as Eva‟s story illustrates in Cagli Seidenberg‟s Come ospiti, when a

196 traumatic past combines with a persistent situation of social exclusion, the consequences of remembering can be deadly even within a middle-class cultured environment.

As I stated above, my mode of analysis consisted in viewing textual spaces conjointly as “perceived” and “conceived,” where the latter defines Secondspaces or representations of the world according to the subjective imaginaries of the authors.

Amelio‟s passage in the interview on Lamerica demonstrates that Albania‟s “strategic” function in his film derives from the connection of its material reality of foreign territory with the director‟s vision of the old and new Italy. The film itself, as a cultural object, is the site of this negotiation between physical and mental space, and as such, it not only represents space but configures, in my view, a “space of representation” and social struggle, a space especially “inhabited and used by artists, writers, and philosophers,” according to Lefebvre‟s definition embraced by Soja‟s Thirdspace (67). Correspondingly, the writers considered in these chapters have appropriated the materiality of space and spatial practices to voice their own positions on a number of issues through the space of their literary products. At a level of “discursively devised representations of space” (Soja

79), I have been able to identify a complex critique of borders comparable to Amelio‟s and likewise addressing questions of memory, belonging, and change.

A variety of marginal sites, conceptualized at once as locations of crisis and of critical re-thinking of categories, has emerged from the various texts. Ebe Cagli

Seidenberg‟s novels have provided powerful images of suspension (resonating with her own experience of exile and double exclusion), as embodied in the representation of

Gibraltar as the place of a “fracture” or, more emblematically, in the drawing Lo

Sgombero. I have envisioned this mannequin-man uncomfortably positioned on a

197 threshold as suggestively conveying the tensions of the liminal subjects in general, and, particularly, of this Italian Jewish writer who, from that narrow space, contested the category of national identity by voicing the traumas of the refugees. Tensions of a different nature stir the texts of Frank Paci and Kym Ragusa, although still rooted in diasporic experiences and dealt with from “dominated spaces.” Paci has problematized the notion of “preservation” of Italian identity abroad, and across generations, as well as within post-World War II Italy, by adopting a perspective “from below” centered on the ordinary life of working-class people. And Ragusa has chosen her own body, black and white, or neither, as the uneasy threshold from where to deconstruct racial dichotomies and emphasize transnational ties.

The disruption of rigid categories evidenced in Lamerica is intertwined with the issues of gender, race, and class explored in the narratives under analysis. To different extents, these representations have given prominence to hybrid constructions of identity based on complex processes of negotiation that contradict the freewheeling crossings of borders often evoked by the postmodern discourse. The vicissitudes of Ebe in Il Tempo dei Dioscuri and Kym in The Skin Between Us, among other characters, have clearly underscored vulnerability, fear, and shame, feelings that in Black Madonna fuel Marie‟s personal and ethnic self-hatred. The irony of her progressive “Italianization” recalls, in reverse order, the transformation into the Other undergone by Gino in Amelio‟s film whereas, on a discursive level, it points to one major source of tension for all of the authors considered, the question of belonging. In fact, these authors‟ postmodern breakdown of categories goes hand in hand with what Ragusa has termed in her memoir

“the anxiety about belonging” (188), a conflicting desire to feel part of the same worlds

198 that exclude them and/or that they contest. In this respect, the role of memory within their liminal writings has contributed to elucidate the negotiations at work between these antagonistic positions.

By and large, memory has served a twofold purpose of denunciation of collective amnesia and of individual emancipation, which the writers have articulated according to their own specific positions. In Cagli Seidenberg‟s texts, memory has appeared directly related to her forced migration and the resulting split between a time of “before” and a time of “after,” which explains the presence of autobiographical and personally owned materials (e.g., letters and drawings) in a novel like Il Tempo dei Dioscuri. The personal act of remembering, performed from a perspective of radical marginality (as an Italian

Jewish woman in the U.S. during World War II), has come to represent a means to denounce the silence enshrouding the “forced exile” (“esilio obbligato”) of a minority group within Italy and its literary tradition. As such, the textual space, has defined her

“strategic location” of gendered resistance against obliviousness, a struggle that she also carried out by deliberately writing in Italian, thus claiming at once her origins and the attention of an Italian audience.

The spatiality of the text has played a similar contestatory role in Ragusa‟s work, as overtly reflected in her self-conscious innovative use of the memoir, a genre often adopted by Italian American authors, to interconnect two Southern migrations and deconstruct the category of race. Within this politically charged framework, Ragusa has exploited a series of devices meant to elicit personal and collective memory, such as references to photographs (one is also reproduced) and legal documents. These have provided a support tailored to her own memories, allowing her to achieve the goals of

199 critiquing racial borders and offering new perspectives on negotiating distances between marginalized subjects within the U.S. and across continents. Paci‟s fictional novels have emphasized yet another employment of memory, although itself stemming from a personal urge to come to terms with his ethnic background and give a voice to working- class Italian migrants. The underlying challenges in both narratives have concerned the migrants‟ children‟s ability to embrace and activate a memory of the Italian past without being oppressed by it. In this regard, I have argued that Paci‟s treatment of the writing space is devotional and ambivalent, in that it reflects his commitment to preserving a memory of local (as opposed to national) Italian “relics” (human, spatial, and linguistic) while questioning a merely archeological approach to the act of preservation. The mechanisms of ethnic reconciliation and re-invention at work in Black Madonna become part of a discourse on writing and traveling in Italian Shoes, within which Paci registers a changing lifestyle of Italy that seems in line with the insights of Lamerica. For instance,

Paci‟s use of shoes as a symbol of “bella figura” recalls, by contrast, the positive connotation that shoes have in the old Italy imagined by Amelio (an icon, in turn, recycled in a negatively, exploitative, light through the ghost shoe factory “Alba

Calzature”), thus confirming the idea of a society gradually valuing materiality and appearance over simple life.

Memory has emerged in this project as a foundational aspect of the liminal writing and a potent reminder of the multiple manifestations of the Italian diaspora.

Remembering entails the risk of looking at distant times with a nostalgic eye and, consequently, falling prey to idealizations, as exemplified by Mark‟s gaze at the farm

(and what it represents) in Italian Shoes. No less insidious is, however, the removal of

200 collective memory that Cagli Seidenberg and Ragusa have exposed, a process that favors the reduplication of racist attitudes within societies, and that certainly characterizes the cultural climate of contemporary Italy. In “mobilizing a relic” (a trope I adopted for

Paci‟s writing in chapter 3) such as Spiro, at a time of immigration, Amelio has proposed to re-think the memory of emigration in light of current events. And conversely, to view immigration through the critical lens of Italian emigration, whose forgotten aspects of violence have been unburied by Gian Antonio Stella in L’orda: quando gli albanesi eravamo noi (2002).

In this dissertation, I have approached the memory of migrants and texts dynamically, looking into the weaknesses embedded in it and highlighting the creative possibilities that it hides. I believe that the theoretical concepts of suspension, mobilized relics, and racial liminality that have emerged during my readings of emigration could effectively be applied within the culture of immigration to Italy in order to establish a

“trialogue” among these two cultures (i.e., emigration and immigration) and what it is commonly understood as the Italian cultural tradition. A comparative investigation of marginal cultural spaces could introduce radically new perspectives into canonical views of Italian national identity and encourage a more in-depth and broad-minded appreciation of the “other,” be it located in Italy or “decontextualized.”

Nevertheless, for emigrant culture to become an active participant in debates on

Italian identity, and for a trialectical exchange to take place, it is necessary to proceed in the direction of a more flexible disciplinary framework (my third area of inquiry). To this end, the model of moving thresholds that I have proposed speaks to the very academic field that officially authorizes this work, that is, Italian Studies, to urge a reassessment of

201 its borders, along with the transformative expansion of its “archive.” As I mentioned at the beginning of this journey, the inclusion of migration as a category of analysis carries along questions about linguistic and disciplinary boundaries to which this dissertation has responded by systematically crossing thresholds. As a result, it positions itself at the intersection of Italian, Italian American, and Italian Canadian studies, embraces spatial concepts evolved even outside of these fields, promotes a comparative and transnational view of migration issues and writing, and concludes with an overture to film and immigration, pointing to a possible trajectory for future research.

The moving threshold is a cross-spatial mode of thinking that thrives in the overlapping, interstitial, areas separating cultural domains, and fails whenever disciplines lock themselves inside self-referential spaces. Within a future-oriented approach that values liminality as a crossing space in which critical contributions to national identity can emerge, I believe that migrant writing should be considered as an ongoing process rooted in historical facts of migration and aimed at exploring the co-implications of cultures.

Co-implication is the key for the translation of this statement into a practical approach to the cultures of Italian migrations (outbound as well as inbound). On one level, as I have tried to make clear, we have writers and texts suspended between cultures, that is to say entangled, implicated in a continuous negotiation and confrontation of centers and margins. On another level, co-implication binds together analyzing discourse and object of analysis. I propose that any analysis of the cultures of Italian migrations from an Italian perspective be carried out without the pretension of holding “a clear view”4 of its object, which, with respect to emigrant cultures, would reproduce the

202 historical dominant/subaltern power relation stressed by Verdicchio. To envision the co- implication of Italian national identity with these cultures involves the recognition of: the complex formation of Italy as a nation; the local and global expressions of its identity; the ways in which Italy defines its migrants and is in turn re-invented by them, generation after generation. Like language, to discuss migrant cultures without “commanding” an aerial view of them, “is to grasp [them] as an ensemble of practices in which one is implicated and through which the prose of the world is at work” (de Certeau 12). I do not see implied in this kind of analysis the risk of weakening the discipline of Italian Studies, but rather the possibility of revitalizing its critical tools and practices while also overcoming rigid formulations of cultural identity. Co-implication allows for and, in fact, requires a plurality of voices and languages to cross over disciplinary boundaries in order to engage dialogically with the construction of Italian identity.

The connection between subject and object of analysis outlined above points to a further and related level of co-implication that occurs with respect to the archive as a

“place of authority.” In the first chapter, I wrote of Cagli Seidenberg‟s attempt to make audible the voices of the “suspended” in a conceptual archive of Italian history and culture. I have then analyzed Paci‟s and Ragusa‟s works about other groups of marginal subjects whose voices are similarly silenced within that structure. A future-oriented approach that aims at letting these voices emerge requires a revision of the notion of archive. In Michel de Certeau: Analysing Culture (2006), Ben Highmore explores the epistemological question of whether the voices of the (dis)possessed can be heard in the archive (anthropological, theological, colonial, and so on), a question that both Spivak and de Certeau seem to answer negatively. According to Highmore, their skepticism

203 results from the repressive function of “The Archive,” an instrument of cultural management classically described by Foucault in The Archeology of Knowledge5 and identified by de Certeau with the “scriptural economy” that the Western culture has constructed to constitute itself in opposition to orality and voices:

The writing laboratory [or scriptural economy] has a “strategic” function: either an item of information received from tradition or from the outside is collected, classified, inserted into a system and thereby transformed, or the rules and models developed in this place (which is not governed by them) allow one to act on the environment and to transform it. The island of the page is a transitional place in which an industrial inversion is made: what comes in is something “received,” what comes out is a “product.” The things that go in are the indexes of a certain “passivity” of the subject with respect to a tradition; those that come out, the marks of his power of fabricating objects. (qtd. in Highmore 90)

The Archive is designed to exorcise heterogeneity by mechanisms of exclusion, mediation and alteration of the voices that it inscribes; hence, de Certeau‟s epistemological pessimism. Instead, departing from Foucault, Highmore focuses on the

“anarchic” nature of the archive: “Exponential expansion of an archive clogs its ability to process data: the heterogeneity of materials short-circuits classificatory regimes…. the

[desire to collect] ultimately acts against the interests of [the will to order]. The archive is an entropic system that fundamentally encourages its own dissolution.” Refashioning it out of what it attempts to “contain” (culture in its plural), Highmore opens up the possibility to imagine “a different architectonics of the archive that might allow a multitude of voices to be much more than a chorus of roaring silence: to make culture hospitable to the voices that inhabit it” (93). Within the disordered archive that Highmore theorizes, the “other” toward whom Cagli Seidenberg, Paci, and Ragusa, each from a

204 specific position, have developed an ethical obligation (the refugee, the ordinary people in motion along migratory routes, the Southern women, etc.) would have a chance to speak. This might be a workable archive model within a future-oriented approach to the cultures of migrations. However, Highmore also points out that epistemological optimism is insufficient to disseminate these voices without the recognition of the complicity with the “scriptural economy” underlying any form of scholarship. Here lies, in other words, a methodological and practical kind of co-implication that cannot be evaded. In concrete terms, this means, for instance, that this dissertation that I have tried to organize to “make culture hospitable to the voices that inhabit it” cannot pretend to be disjointed from its association with “The Archive,” of which this specific work constitutes one of multiple actualizations. Being itself based on criteria of inclusion and exclusion, it is practically a

“micro-archive,” one among many “synecdoches of archives,” as Highmore would term it. “Caught” in this ambiguity, its strength must result from its ability to mobilize and connect a number of liminal texts and voices, and to include them into the Archive with the goal of stretching, entropically, its borders.

Finally, I would like to conclude with what I consider a cinematic embodiment of a moving threshold, which is the closing seven-minute sequence of Lamerica, showing a crammed Albanian ship sailing to the Italian coast. The boat has been described as the

“heterotopia par excellence” (Foucault, in Soja 162), a real place that contains all other places, “represented, contested, inverted in all their lived simultaneities and juxtapositions” (158). I take the ship to represent a limen that, drifting away from a port, undertakes a physical crossing of national borders while evoking, with its movement to the open sea, the unleashed imagination and dreams of its cargo of humans migrants. On

205 this moving threshold, the deranged Spiro/Michele reminds us that Albanian women, men, and children, like the Italians once were, are en route to “Lamerica,” to the promise of a better life, as their faces show in a series of close-ups. With a final “strategic” (or

“tactical,” in de Certeau‟s terms) operation, Amelio has the passengers look directly at the camera, a transgression of the cinematic conventions that allows the Albanians on screen to communicate with the viewers through their gazes, and encourage them to reflect on the hardships and hopes of the migrants. The director has thus empowered the filmic space6 by entangling its fictional representation of the world to the socio-historical context of immigration. Along these lines, it is to be hoped that the textual readings and conceptualizations comprised in this dissertation may contribute to raise consciousness about migration issues and a more sympathetic view of past and present migrants, as well as invite new interdisciplinary endeavors about Italian identity as liminality.

Notes

1. Lamerica is a critically acclaimed film that won the Director‟s Award at the 1994 Venice International Film Festival and the Felix Award for the best European film, attesting to Amelio‟s masterly skills and his national and international reputation. For further information on the making of Lamerica, its critical reception, and interviews to the director, refer to: Vitti (Chapter 7, 253-87), Scalzo (173-215), and Crowdus and Georgakas (197-209).

2. Fabio Amato has, for instance, noted the spectacularization of Lampedusa and Otranto, where the negative attention drawn by the influx of migrants has led to the birth, in the case of Lampedusa, of the annual musical festival O‟ Scià, which promotes information on immigration issues and cultural integration, and the touristic re-launch of the “doorway to the East” in the case of Otranto (50-3).

3. See interview with Mario Sesti, in Scalzo 175.

4. De Certeau pointed out that by recognizing of being “caught” in ordinary language and in the present of his historicity, Wittgenstein denied the philosopher a position of mastery over the analyzed “object,” a move that echoes Mark‟s repositioning, in Italian Shoes, from a dome/dominant to a grounded perspective on his cultural background. As such, states de Certeau, philosophy cannot proceed as if it could “command a clear view” of the use of words. In the

206 absence of privileged standpoints, truths are thus to be reduced to linguistic facts (or “documents”) “by criticism of the places of authority in which facts are converted into truths” (11). See de Certeau, chapter I, 8-14.

5. “The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events. But the archive is also that which determines that all these things that were said do not accumulate endlessly in an amorphous mass, nor are they inscribed in an unbroken linearity, nor do they disappear at the mercy of chance accidents; but they are grouped together in distinct figures, composed together in accordance with multiple relations, maintained or blurred in accordance with specific regularities; that which determines that they do not withdraw at the same pace in time, but shine, as it were, like stars, some that seem close to us shining brightly from afar off, while others that are in fact close to us are already growing pale” (qtd. in Highmore 85).

6. The question of the empowerment of the Albanian subjects in the film remains, instead, contentious, see Rodica Diaconescu-Blumenfeld, “Lamerica, History in Diaspora,” Romance Languages Annual 11 (1999): 167-73.

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